Genesis was born in Northern Canada to a South-Indian father and Scandinavian mother. She went to art school for film and sculpture and “ran a few galleries” before concentrating full-time on music. Her first band, Moan, played DIY shows with last-minute beats and slipshod lyrics. It wasn’t long after she began putting her music online that the cult Atlanta rapper and Awful Records boss Father got in touch (Awful, which consists of about sixteen members including Father, KeithCharlesSpaceBar, Abra, and Lord Narf, is positioned at the innovative forefront of Atlanta’s (t)rap scene and advocates warped, futuristic sonic mutations).

Genesis’s music and lyrics stand out for their f*ck-it-up rebelliousness, brash wit, and references to sex in its kinkier, darker forms. They are deeply informed by her punk ethos (she was a hardcore kid first: “live punk music is like a deep internal massage. The frequencies seep into the heaviness of my heart and console my anxiety” (Dazed)) and engagement with gender/identity politics. Although Tommy Genesis has been deepweb-lauded as one of the faces of a new generation of iconoclastic female rappers, she herself doesn’t attribute this success to a victorious struggle against oppression—rather, according to her, she’s encountered few obstacles (“if there is a box I’m not really aware of it” (Paper Mag)). She rejects the tendency to “play the victim” and simply finds her work empowering.

Genesis is in the last stages of mastering her follow-up album World Vision 2 and is also working on the collaborative Daughters EP with Awful labelmate Abra.