Steve Lacy’s ‘Oh yeah?’ Is Firmly His Own Genre

Steve Lacy’s ascent has been singular. A member of The Internet at 16, he built a parallel career as a producer and collaborator for Kendrick Lamar, Solange, and Blood Orange before he could legally drink. His solo work took off with “Dark Red” and later “Bad Habit,” a TikTok-fueled smash that cemented him as a pop architect. With Oh yeah?, his third album, he returns not to replicate that virality but to deepen a sonic vocabulary that already feels unmistakably his.

The record assembles lo-fi textures, languid guitar lines, and soulful grooves into a cohesive whole. The title track sets the tone: flirty, self-aware, and built on a melody that drifts with purpose. Lacy’s lyrics often undercut the sweetness—“life’s a bitch, and then you live again,” he sings, twisting Nas with a shrug. Across the album, he balances weight with buoyancy. On “nice shoes / in your world,” a standout, the line “I can’t seem to fall in love, it’s bad luck / Careful how you spend your time, it adds up” lands with a lightness that belies its ache.

Erykah Badu’s brief, airy appearance on “Pure Colour” is a fitting cameo—her presence feels like a nod to a lineage Lacy is audibly extending. The songwriting still orbits relationship anxieties, as on “the feeling,” which revisits the same what-are-we space that animated “Bad Habit.” But the mood is less urgent. Tracks like “Show you me” strip back to earnestness, while “doom” swirls alt-rock guitars into the mix without disrupting the album’s lazy-day logic.

Oh yeah? isn’t built for the charts, even if its hooks are sharp enough to land there. It sounds like an artist comfortable in the world he’s made, content to let the songs breathe rather than grab at fleeting attention.