Before even listening to the music of Steve Lacy’s latest album, Oh yeah?, something can be gleaned. The title is, like the artist, nonchalant. It is cool and somewhat separate from everything else, reacting with only the slightest measured disbelief. Of his three studio albums, the first cover cuts his face from view entirely, the second obscures it with cutouts, and his latest finally reveals it to the audience. The reveal feels appropriate, perhaps even inevitable, as the artist’s most vulnerable work to date. Lacy returns to music with a chameleon-like ability to alter his style without losing his musical identity.
An 80s-style buzzing synth track begins oh yeah? before Lacy’s voice repeatedly urges us, “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.” With the words, his classic guitar and drumbeat combo ingrain themselves into the new soundscape. The song feels looped into its own backing; it grows in intensity only to simmer back down and fall into Lacy’s lulling repetition. The music seems happy and hopeful, but Lacy is–as always–sardonic. He sings, “Life’s a bitch / And then you live again / Tragedies and wins.” The lyrics are cliche, but Lacy subverts them with an unexpected sincerity, “Could my hope be of value? […] / We’re too young to die.” Before he’s able to continue, however, his own repetitive “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon” cuts the reflection off.
Vocally, Lacy backs himself in a way that makes the lyrically sparse song feel full. The singer plays with register in a more pronounced version of his classic style, swapping between resonant lower notes and clear falsetto ones. Just before the song ends, the music cuts, a final electric guitar chord plays, and a piano melody softly accompanies Lacy’s humming. The song is timid and existential, tantalising in its juxtaposition of lyrical emptiness with sonic richness, altogether creating a world that feels deeply reflective and scared of its own vulnerability.
In contrast, is it cool? jumps into brutal honesty without judgement. “Tatay died when I was like ten / I turned out to be just fine, I just cheat every now and again,” Lacy admits, linking his infidelity to his father’s death. The lyrics are blunt, with the singer often falling into soliloquies of self-hatred. “You ain’t gotta trust me to love me, baby / Yeah, ‘cause I don’t even trust myself,” he reveals as the song’s bumpy, clicking backing becomes more technical and bass-heavy. The song also exposes a dissonance between love and sex. While sex is often used as a shorthand for the former, Lacy and SZA, the song’s feature, reveal that they actually use sex to avoid intimacy, the reason behind Lacy’s tendency to cheat.
SZA acts as a breath of fresh air amidst his self-indulgent lyricism. Where Lacy sings, “I don’t wanna cheat no more, be no whore [...] / Be your honest lover, babe,” SZA decenters the self, singing “Being vulnerable is exhausting, babe / Can we get naked instead of talking, babe?” Lacy also brings back his fear of death, revealed in the album’s opening song, “No, we not forever young, we could die any day.” Like love and sex are sometimes detrimental to one another, Lacy’s self-growth is continuously cut off by his fear of imminent death. He wants to be a better person, but finds short-term satisfaction undermines his desire because it’s the easier choice at hand. “We could be,” he explains, “unless we can’t.” Every opening Lacy gives himself (musically and in the song’s narrative), he ultimately rejects by avoiding definitives. He sings, “Maybe I should trust myself,” intentionally using ‘maybe’ to obfuscate his own responsibility. Even in the final possibility for musical progression, the beat falls flat, and the song ends abruptly.
The feeling is perhaps the album’s standout song. The music is a funkier version of Lacy’s already amazing production. His vocals are echoey without feeling distant; he blends seamlessly into the music, often layered over himself and playing with his voice in a way that feels unique to the album. Where is it cool? allowed Lacy to eschew his own vulnerability, the feeling flips the roles; Lacy is now the insecure person in a relationship. He nurtures the feelings of love, but can’t help feeling suspicious about his partner’s lack of commitment. Everything feels life-or-death in the relationship because the singer wants to be affirmed, but is willing to do anything to keep his partner there.
Lacy presents a need, but also reveals that he’s willing to overlook his own needs for the sake of love. “I often wonder where your head is / So confused,” he sings, but he ultimately concedes, “The heart takes what it wants, I’m not scared to bleed.” Vulnerability, in this way, becomes a site for negotiation. While the artist previously rejected vulnerability for the sake of protecting his self-image, in the feeling, the relationship is desperate enough that Lacy is willing to ‘degrade’ himself to the position of the ‘vulnerable one,’ “Oh, please come take me, please come take me.” But, it only works to a varying degree.
“After all, there’s one thing I don’t know / Am I ya baby? Am I ya baby?” he asks over and over throughout the song. He explains the relationship as tumultuous and non-rewarding, “When your heart’s on your sleeve, but it don’t even matter [...] / When it seems it was some kind of dream, but it happened.” The music fades out slowly, with Lacy’s trilling notes almost masquerading as violin strums. The choice feels representative of the whole song; Lacy pretends something works for him, and though it almost does, something about it just doesn’t quite fit.
This ethos transitions seamlessly into pure colour with Erykah Badu. “I hardly recognize myself [...] / Can’t let you go, take control of me,” sings a breathy, vibrato-heavy Lacy. The song is hypnotising with its warbly, bassy production. An electric guitar note sustains itself in the background, buzzing steadily in a way that feels like a whisper, emphasised by the easy, breezy voice of the feature, Erykah Badu. The sound is a manifestation of the singers’ desire to “feel lighter [...] / feel better” to contend with the heavier subject matter of the song (“My family thinks I’ll be my father / They don’t know shit, take control of me”). The tension between lover and family is a common trope (especially for queer artists), but the song avoids feeling too heavy by employing an intentional sparsity. We are only given vague snippets of the tension this lover is causing, and instead, we are steeped in metaphor and desire: “You’re the reflection in my mirror [...] / My want for you runs deep as hell / I choke on smoke, it takes a toll on me.” Finally, the song ends with an echoey countdown from ten. At times, the numbers are overpowered by the aquatic, echoey soundscape, but eventually, Lacy falls into his lower register, ending with a spoken “two” as the song fades into silence.
This tension between light and heavy continues in the deceptively soft, acoustic show you me. Though the song sings of “candy crushes” and being “in love,” the love seems obsessive and self-sacrificial. “If I make a mess, I’ll clean it up / ‘Cause I need you close and to myself / And I wanna please you, you’re my favorite,” sings Lacy, “I think I’m in love with you / I think you should be in love with me.” Love in the song’s narrative is never certain, but unrequited. Lacy continuously reaches out for his lover, pressuring him with the finitude of life (“We don’t have to rush, but I could die today”). Though there is some semblance of familiarity between the two (“Love the new tattoo”), Lacy ultimately admits that the two don’t know each other, or at the very least don’t truly know each other, “Maybe we should meet / Introduce myself / I could show you me.” This sense of unfamiliarity feels prevalent in the song’s music, which feels very different from Lacy’s other work.
On some lines, in fact, his voice even takes on a country twang, but he diffuses it with his signature, witty lyricism like “Hard to smile ‘cause I had the coochie stuck in my teeth / Been a while since I had some coochie stuck in my teeth / As of late, I guess, I’ve been leaning closer to D.” Elements of the familiar and unfamiliar create an interesting space where Lacy’s vulnerability can both be played as a joke and taken in earnest. At one point, Lacy asks, “Are you even gay? / ‘Cause you seem so fun.” Lacy intentionally toes this line using humour because even if he is not being overtly vulnerable, he is expressing the desire to be. Lacy replaces his regular electric guitar whining with a literal whining, repeating a nasally “wow, wow” until the song’s end.
In doom, the artist essentially admits to this tactic, “Everybody does it but nobody talks / About how they feel until it’s too late / Shit piled up and now it’s doomsday.” The song begins like a rockier version of something by Korea Girl, but eventually transitions into a more classic Steve Lacy beat. The song is both an anthem of self-hatred and the acceptance that Lacy is just a product of his generation (the same way all of us are). “Life in the freaked out generation / Everybody fucking but nobody gives a fuck / ‘bout love just validation,” he sings, rehashing the album’s earlier theme of the dissonance between love and sex.
Lacy’s vocal layering is gorgeous, especially with the soft drumming and electric beeping. About halfway through, his voice, along with the music, stretches out and becomes flatter in a manner similar to Dominic Fike. “In the valley / Of the shadow of death [...] / Buddha, backseat of the SUV / Now we fuck until it brings world peace,” he sings, before returning to the song’s original melody, “It’s doomsday.” Lacy juxtaposes the outreaching aims of religion–themes of world peace, neighbourliness, and embracing suffering–with what he considers a generational selfishness. Doomsday acts, then, not as an Abrahamic end of time, but as the continual interpersonal crises that erupt in our self-centred worlds. Though the song only ever foregrounds the word “doomsday,” as opposed to “doom,” which is instead a repeated backing vocal, the title is a smart choice, because it gets at the feeling of doom as opposed to the event of ‘doomsday.’
Three-quarters of the way through, however, the song’s trajectory changes again and goes full acoustic. The lyrics paint Lacy as confronting the intense feelings of self-hatred created by self-obsession, before telling listeners they need to quiet down in order for him to do so. “Blah, blah, blah, blah / Shut the fuck up,” Lacy lulls, almost in a lullaby, before about twenty seconds of straight silence. Basically, the song admits to self-obsession, but also reminds us listeners that we are just as guilty.
Funnily, the silence of doom fades into the romantic acoustic of nothing. Lacy returns to being obsessed with his lover, even if it’s one-sided. The melody is simple until a synth track and chorus-like vocal backing fade in, then quickly back out, into silence. The words “mind” (“Nothin’ can keep you off my mind”) and “mine” melt into each other, complicating the relationship between Lacy and his lover. Love and ownership become blurry, with the final line “You’re mine, you’re mine” eerily resounding. As listeners, we are left wondering at Lacy’s intentions in the relationship, whether he really loves this person or if his obsession has turned into a toxic desire to control them.
In lovesexdrugbomb, Lacy reaches a point of realisation in the relationship, “Are we over? It don’t feel that over.” The song is Mitski meets Minnie Riperton, romantic and convoluted to the point of self-harm. The boy-obsession is simply a salve for the complexity of getting older, losing passion and romance for life, “Been through ’bout two boyfriends, you’re still my desire / I still love you, met no one above you / I ain’t trying to bug you, but I need you right / Here.” Halfway through, Cecile Believe takes over the song with a beeping Imogen Heap-style melody. She sings, “We get elastic, we pull it like plastic.” The clever wordplay swaps typically associated adjectives to analogise the idea that what doesn’t bend will, inevitably, break. Elastic gets loose, and is, by its nature, insecure. Plastic, on the other hand, is non-malleable and pulling it leads to no avail, no movement. Despite all this, the artist still admits, “Love to run it back, ‘cause it’s a classic [...] / I miss you more, I want you more than when I had it.” In a falsetto end, Lacy begs for his lover’s return, “I’m waiting for it […] / You dirty dog, come back around.”
Nice shoes/in your world is tonally different from all of Lacy’s other work. The experimental track, for example, is not only nine minutes long, but has no noise until about twenty-one seconds in. When sound does come in, it’s a quiet alarm-style, almost-techno dance beat. Lacy’s voice comes in strong. The first third of the song is direct, with him saying, “Life is but a stain, it’s not a tattoo / Temporary pain, it’s lame to chase youth.” He admits, “Even when I clear my head to make room / Still feel claustrophobia, I can’t move,” explaining the frequent silences throughout the album as attempts to clear his head and make room to process. Throughout the song, he gets stuck in a loop, singing “Make it stop” over and over, signaling a fall into self-hate that perpetually returns.
The second third of the song is classic Steve Lacy, smooth and highlighting the singer’s vocal skill. He advises, “Let down your guard / And be honest enough to let it out.” He repeats, “I’m in,” intentionally playing into the homophonic sounds of “honest” and “amen.” The line becomes a prayer, an aspiration, rather than reflecting reality as is. Lacy is bluntly hopeful, referencing the album’s opening track, “Life’s a bitch, and then you live again [...] / Excuse me while I spiral downwards.” In the last third of the song, a choir sings, “Ooh, in your world,” which the artist overlays with his own spoken word. He states, “If I ever did you wrong / Just know I was going through my own shit, it wasn’t really about you / It was always just about me,” bringing the album’s self-obsession to a point of culmination (even, perhaps, frustration).
But he quickly dispels it, flipping the self-obsession back on listeners, “And if you did me wrong, I know it wasn’t really about me either.” Lacy uncollapses listeners from himself, stating, “I need to go back to my world [...] it’s too much being here / I can’t be here too much / You can’t be in my world all the time either.” Though music can give listeners a way to feel seen, he points out that, at the end of the day, the art centres him. There is a balanced relationship between the two; we are given music, and we take from it what we can, an apt commentary in a song that feels like an experiment on what it means to be an active listener.
Bebe has the muffled rock sound of a 1950s song, emphasised by Lacy’s poetic use of magic to explain how strong his feelings are (“You put me under your spell tonight / With your fairy dust / Ass and black magic [...] / I’m hexed”). Lacy concentrates the mystical and contradictory effects of love. “You took my number but you failed to call,” he sings, before asking, “What made you think I ever cared at all?” Though he feigns not caring, he still makes the song about the subject, even pointing out the lover’s failure through inaction. After a round of beautiful runs on the word “Bebe,” he sings, “I never had you and it’s still too much [...] / You scare me, baby, in an awesome way.” Though this lover was never ‘Lacy’s,’ they still opened his heart to the possibility of vulnerability. Like the artist affirms, “It wasn’t like me to leave my heart on the floor [...] / It’s unlike me to feel so incredibly sure.” Despite the win that is human vulnerability, it always has its risks. The song, and therefore, the album, end: “That’s the story about the time I got my life screwed up.” The music halts abruptly, the final line revealing a new way to read the album, making it feel like the intense, condensed story of one night.
Though Oh yeah? differs in many ways from his previous albums, Steve Lacy’s lyricism is sharper than ever. He plays with disclosed information in a way that makes the album’s story gripping, keeping listeners interested until its final line, which ultimately proves worth it. The sound of the album is new enough to shock listeners, but still plays to the strengths of the artist’s classic indie rock. Even if the sound was a dealbreaker for ‘Steve Lacy traditionalists,’ they’d still have about half the album to listen to. Lacy’s voice also shines; he leans more into vocal agility and layers his voice in a beautiful, choral manner in a way his previous work did not.
Oh yeah? follows a trajectory towards vulnerability. It begins existentially, before revealing deeper layers of sadness and desire, confronting aging, and finally ends in resignation. However, Lacy still maintains his wit and irony all without recycling the humour of Gemini Rights. Overall, Oh yeah? feels like a fresh musical era for Steve Lacy, whose post-Gemini Rights stardom somewhat trumped his role as musician. The artist has certainly achieved his goal of surprising over subverting with an album that is unexpected without feeling artificial for the sake of shock value.