Album Review: Oh yeah? by Steve Lacy
Steve Lacy cut much of his third album in Paris with a clear head for the first time. The love songs that came back are the most direct he’s ever sung.
Up until recently, lyrics took a backseat to beats. As a Compton high schooler, Steve Lacy created tracks on the Internet using an iPhone, sketched a chorus, passed on the rest, and that was how “Bad Habit” took TikTok by storm and earned him his first No. 1 and a Grammy nomination in 2022. For four years afterwards, he went silent, opened up a fresh round of studio sessions right after his debut album Gemini Rights, recorded many of them in Paris, stopped drinking coffee and smoking edibles midway, and explained to Rolling Stone, “I’m ready to speak my mind.” That is what his newest album Oh yeah? is all about.
“On ‘is it cool?’ featuring SZA, he gets right down to the worst of it, ‘I just cheat every now and again,’ and he keeps the drums low as the two vocalists address the same question from different sides. In his verses, he adds to that list his absent father, self-destructiveness whenever his heart is at stake, wishing to be the one that she tells her mom about, and finally he sings about everything with no holds barred: ‘You ain’t gotta trust me to love me, baby/‘Cause I don’t even trust myself.’ SZA stretches her lines as his are tightly knit, and together they exchange the same question: if it is cool or she will be a fool to love him. Lacy gets excited about an entirely one-sided situation, and confesses he turns “feral/Like I’m out of water” whenever he feels the silence getting too long.
Below it all there lurks a funky groove that never stops moving. He recreates oh yeah? out of the elements he has trusted ever since his Internet days—guitar chords, rubber bass, dry drum machine hits, and his phrasing sounds casual until you realize how carefully each of his small hooks is laid. He expands that formula to the whole band on “the feeling,” the bass line walking through changes while the falsetto rides on top, and writes his most desperate lyrics against it. He drinks “drunker than a bitch” while looking at old pictures, makes a decision that being a burden is better than holding it all inside, and walks the bridge straight into the songwriter’s trap: “When you start writing songs just to stop thinking ‘bout him/Then you start writing songs, and you make ‘em about him.”
And he allows it to become even uglier. Both sides of “doom” go at a crawl pace, with a heavier bass and slower drum hits, and he takes on the role of a villain in Sin City, a big baby who believes karma is a bitch and bets she is pretty. He analyzes his own “freaked-out generation” in his most blunt lyrics: “Everybody fuckin’, but nobody gives a/Fuck ‘bout love, just validation.” And Part II leaves off the preaching altogether; he loses focus, loses passions, and needs quiet badly enough to write a whole chorus of “Shut the fuck up.”
Erykah Badu has been his named influence since he was a teenager, and on “pure colour” she meanders through his loosest soul groove, bending her lines however she likes while he keeps it carefully constructed, and singing that she does not recognize herself anymore. In his response verse, he confronts his family, relatives who think he is going to turn into his father, waving him away in one line: “They don’t know shit, take control of me.” Cecile Believe takes “lovesexdrugbomb” somewhere synthetic, processed vocal harmonies over the drum machine pulsations, and in her refrain she reinterprets the on/off romance as something flexible, still right where they left it. Lacy follows with his funniest suggestion, “Kill your boyfriend,” retracted a beat later with “‘Kay, maybe that’s excessive, but I need you right here,” the rom-com he says he cried through until he laughed.
In August last year he released “nice shoes” as a solo. Now he has expanded it into a two-part suite “nice shoes / in your world,” which allows the filtered buildup to settle into a long groove jam, with a James Brown vocal sample borrowed from Lyn Collins’ “Think (About It).” He has never sounded lonelier or funnier at once: “If I, if I had a dollar for the friends I would fuck/I could buy a pair of really nice shoes.” He admits to being sad without realizing it, leaning on nothing but “my guitar and serotonin,” calls himself a “non-confront, avoidant, lonely coward,” and begs for permission to spiral. In Part II, he addresses a roomful of beautiful people, calls one of them an angel, confesses his own problems have always been about himself, and retreats back to his world before it becomes too heavy for them. He saves “bebe” for the comedown, a hexed little love spell where his friends bring him in off an edible, and he appears, somehow, holding wedding vows.
His most nervy groove goes to his crush. On “show you me,” he makes the beat click instead of thump, a snare hit followed by a guitar stab followed by a bass, and steps around it, playing love police on himself, sure he is in love, and equally sure the other party should be. Then he becomes nervous to the core, praising the new tattoo, throwing in an “Are you even gay?” in mid-approach, and making the only move he can think of: “Maybe we should meet/Introduce myself, I could show you me.”
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “the feeling,” “doom,” “nice shoes / in your world”