Genesis Owusu - STRUGGLER (2023)

On his debut Smiling With No Teeth, Ghanaian-Australian artist Genesis Owusu struck nerves with a distinctly '90s-born perspective on how to shape a characteristic sound: a style that could technically be traced back to roots in hip-hop. That only served to highlight how easily he could take that route into a post-genre expression where R&B, synthpop, and alt-rock all played on the same frequency. And that was reflected in his multifaceted perspective as a singer-songwriter given to stretching his range from steely, emphatic raps to vulnerable-not-fragile falsetto in the former half of that equation, and an often-strident yet necessarily frank confronter of social cruelty and oppression in the latter. Struggler maintains Owusu's startlingly adept eclecticism as a musician: the needling synth sequencing on opener "Leaving the Light" is pure Freedom of Choice DEVO with a touch of P-Funk swing. The new-wave funk of "Tied Up" feels like an anthem for a hundred-year empire built on the Minneapolis Sound, and the gauzy semi-industrial grunge-gaze of cuts like "The Roach" and "Old Man" make for more daring takes on the open-ended possibilities of '90s alt than half the bands that got signed post-Nevermind. But those feel less like retro moves than an attempt to use the context of the past to make sense of a future that seems short on promise, and Struggler doesn't just confront it it perseveres through it, building off an existential anxiety-drive that draws as much on Beckett and Kafka as it does on the immigrant-diaspora persistence of an outsider just trying to live.