Tommy Genesis Lives Through This

After hitting a creative wall, the Vancouver-born “fetish rapper” isn’t starting over—she’s exploring the spaces in between.

Published on August 5, 2025

by Cam Delisle

Cover photo by Cristian Diaz

I didn’t get to see Tommy Genesis’s face when we spoke. No grainy Zoom square, no obscured webcam—just her voice, beguiling and deliberate, curling through my headphones like smoke. With no outfit to praise and no makeup to parse, she became that of pure suggestion.

Still, I imagine her on the other side of the screen—full glam, but not in that dead-eyed, overworked celebrity way. I see her in the same latex armour that she’s worn in her self-directed videos, dripping with that contentious power she exudes in “100 Bad” or her fashion world, cage-rap performances. Lashes that cut glass. Chrome-painted acrylics. Bleach blonde mane, wild under a spotlight, that no camera ever caught—because with Genesis, the image is never just for looking at.

The self-styled “fetish rapper” has unashamedly cooed about sexuality and identity in her music since even before her 2018 self-titled debut, but it’s her facile drive for constant reinvention that truly defines her art. She once said that she’s reborn every day—a fitting truth for someone whose birth name, Genesis Yasmine Mohanraj, marks her as someone born carrying the weight of beginnings in her blood.

Nearly four years out from goldilocks x, Genesis’s last full-length, her new project, Genesis, sheds the club-ready, bad-bitch swagger for something darker and more subdued—a restless and organic shift from its predecessor. “I started writing Genesis three years ago, and I think, for me, it began as just, ‘Who am I?’” she says. That thesis isn’t a dismissal of what came before—it’s a plunge inward, an unyielding excavation of something subconsciously undiscovered. “Somewhere during the process, it became not just about my origin story, but my identity as a whole.”

Genesis wasn’t sparked by rupture, but by decay, a dull ache and boredom, creeping in like mould beneath polished surfaces. Its creation became a question of survival: pivot, or risk detachment? “At some point, I got boxed into this very specific lane that I felt too comfortable in,” she says. “And I had to ask myself, ‘What’s next for me?’ Because I’m getting bored.” That boredom was seemingly essential, causing a soft corrosion at the edges of her purpose. So she turned inward, not to escape, but to interrogate: What am I making, and why? “I started thinking about the artists I love—Frank Ocean, Lauryn Hill—people who dig deep into themselves and aren’t trying to be someone else,” she starts, further putting it candidly: “I just didn’t feel like talking shit over house music anymore.”

Though the album (for the most part) moves beyond the club, the dancefloor’s presence survives through a single moment. On “Baby are you okay?,” a wobble lurches forward with a smeared and distorted hook—the sole moment of nightclub catharsis cutting through Genesis’s narrative shroud, both familiar and deliberately out of place. The rest of the album rides on looping guitars, punctuated sporadically by hi-hats and snare hits, trading her familiar haze for a more restrained sound. “I didn’t really show it to anyone for at least a month after I’d written it,” she says. “I hated it initially.” When she came back to it, though, something had shifted. “I felt that it was important, whether or not it’s for everyone.”

More than anything, that importance lies in how nakedly confessional Genesis is, reading more like a diary than a blueprint. It’s a project built on voice memos, spirals, and self-doubt reframed as clarity. “Honestly, I didn’t have any cards left to play. I’ve been Tommy Genesis for ten years,” she admits. “You know those computer games where you cultivate all the land? It was like that. Like, I’ve farmed this entire world, it’s time to pack my bags and go somewhere else.” It’s this refusal to stay planted that allows self-reflection to become an act of deliberate departure, turning the mirror into a passage rather than a wall. “Maybe I could’ve gone super experimental and started making weird, noise metal… But as someone who writes everything themselves, being honest was all that I had left.”

This album demanded a stripping down, whether deliberate or not. The unraveling of personas and defenses she’d worn for years came suddenly—like dropping a tightly wound ball of yarn, threads loosening and falling apart. “I think that, in a way, the ego protects, because honestly I don’t think that I could kill my ego,” she says. “I’m not sure that I think anyone can.” It wasn’t about erasing her ego—it was about learning to coexist with it, knowing when to silence it before it became a barrier. “I know I’m weird, I’ve always been weird, and I already don’t give a fuck… but I had to give even less of a fuck during this process.” That reckoning allowed her to strip away not just the noise, but the need for permission—carving out space to be unapologetic without compromise.

“It’s for my city where the trees grow / It’s for the children of an immigrant / Came here for a better life and did things only real heroes did / It’s for that little girl in school, her real name was ‘Genesis,’” she bares on the record’s opener, “Rainbow Child.” Here, Genesis unashamedly plants her roots deeper in the immigrant stories that shaped her upbringing and her music. The track feels almost like a letter to her younger self—a kind of homage to Vancouver, a city that’s both home and a backdrop to her identity.

As a Vancouver native, she talks about the love and frustration locals often feel, caught between admiration and critique—but you won’t find much of the latter from Genesis. “I love Vancouver, I miss it all the time. Talking about it in my music comes really natural to me,” she says. “There’s another song on the album, ‘Homebound,’ that’s about Vancouver.” On “Homebound,” the city hums beneath her breath—a spectral tether pulling her from afar. “I don’t think that anyone really vents to me about [Vancouver]. Maybe they’re scared of me because of how much I love it.”

Despite how exposed Genesis feels, its rollout has been almost meditative. “You’re gonna learn more about me by listening to the album, I’ve really said it all now,” she says with straight-faced conviction. “I really just cut myself open, put my guts on the table, and was like… ‘Here you go.’” It’s a rare and necessary kind of transparency—not just for Genesis herself, but for the audience tuned in to her evolution. In 2025, listeners crave proximity. The illusion of access isn’t enough; they want the intimacy and the blurred lines. And while many artists guard those boundaries more than ever—Chappell Roan, for instance, famously keeps her personal life sealed off from her work—Genesis has chosen the opposite. She parts the curtain willingly, inviting listeners directly into the core.

Genesis exists not as a manufactured figure, but as an ongoing becoming—a living paradox of vulnerability layered beneath control. Genesis may carry the name of arrival, but in her hands it becomes untethered. There’s no rewinding to a pristine origin. Instead, she excavates the sediment—of roots, longing, ego, and confusion—then breathes purpose into each fracture.

Here’s why that matters in 2025: it’s a rare offering of boundary‑less honesty that refuses to be commodified. You feel her. Tommy Genesis doesn’t invite you in for consumption—she births a space where echoes of exile, memory, and defiance converge. That’s what her new album Genesis not just demands of you, but delivers in return. It’s not an album to pick apart, it hands you the truth, unguarded and intact. Tommy Genesis doesn’t want to be your favourite artist, she wants to be the one who made you feel something you couldn’t name until now.