Steve Lacy Proves He’s a Defining Pop Auteur On ‘Oh Yeah?’

When Steve Lacy released “Nice Shoes” last summer — a teaser for his new album Oh Yeah? that dropped alongside his Rolling Stone cover story — the song took fans by surprise. Its frenetic breakbeat signaled a looming sonic departure for Lacy, whose Grammy-winning output includes virtuosic instrumentation for everyone from The Internet (their long-awaited new album is on the way) to Kendrick Lamar. Even so, the song’s later moments, punctuated by a more familiar Steve plucking his guitar and crooning sweetly, pointed to something more dynamic. On his long-gestating album, Lacy builds an ambitious universe around those instincts, turning breakbeats, guitar ballads, trip-hop murk, and crude-almost-cringe humor into a volatile pop language unmistakably his own.

Not that genre-splicing rock and experimental R&B are Gen Z inventions. The obvious comparison — and the subject of ongoing TikTok debate — is Frank Ocean’s now decade-old Blonde, which similarly fused the melodic shrapnel of its creator’s many influences into a coherent, at times profoundly moving, body of work. With Oh Yeah?, Lacy makes his strongest claim yet to being one of Gen Z’s defining pop auteurs, his own kaleidoscopic inspirations revealing a tenderness beneath all the restless movement. On “Is it cool,” he’s joined by SZA, who proves to be a fitting co-conspirator in the song’s romantic chaos. Both artists have a knack for candidly unhinged hooks forged in the heat of romance. “You ain’t gotta trust me to love me, baby,” Lacy sings with enough sincerity to make you believe him as much as he does.

The song bleeds into the angelic “the feeling,” the first official single from the album, and a fully engrossing ballad that manages to breathe new life into its influences. A patient bass line simmers beneath the effortlessly sticky melody, which wisps like smoke through the atmosphere, all in service of Lacy’s soaring vocals delivering the disarmingly heartfelt chorus: “Am I your baby?” Then, just as soon as any distinct sonic register takes hold, we’re transported again. You might swear you’ve landed on a Portishead record by the time “Pure Color,” featuring Erykah Badu, hits. The slow-rolling and dubby excursion is as riveting as Badu has sounded in recent memory, her rhythmic vocals surfing along the track’s bass-heavy sonics while Lacy achieves a chilling whisper, singing about a love all-consuming.

So, okay, we’re in trip-hop territory, one might think — except there’s that guitar again on “Show You Me,” which might turn out to be the album’s secret mainstream hit. Where Lacy’s previous album, the Grammy-winning Gemini Rights, found him proving to be comfortable in the grandness of pop maximalism — and the billion-stream songs therein — Oh Yeah? operates at a more subtle register. What ties it all together, oddly enough, are Lacy’s crazy-ass lyrics. “Been a while since I had some coochie stuck in my teeth,” he sings on “Show You Me” with a level of assuredness that makes you briefly forget how absurd a statement that is. Here, Lacy’s at-times-jarring sense of humor is balanced by the ice-cream-sweet chorus, delivered with an earnestness that feels like being let in on Lacy’s unfiltered thoughts.

The same goes for “lovesexdrugbomb,” which lands with the freewheeling emotionality of a voice note. Cecile Believe, whom Lacy couldn’t stop raving about during his cover story interview, arrives with a second hook, imbuing the song with a slick R&B finish while Lacy’s guitar brings the mood closer to the clouds. Lyrically, Oh Yeah? is concerned with the plausibility of love, and Lacy’s own queer identity and his relationship to his late father — and thus his Filipino heritage — come through effortlessly, like learning the details of a friend’s life through what feels like osmosis.

The album’s denouement arrives in its final two tracks, beginning with the nine-minute expansion of last year’s teaser, “Nice Shoes / In Your World,” its quick-footed breakbeat now ushered in by transfixing synths. In context, the song lands like an emotional release — the party scene in Girls where Hannah tries cocaine, the rush of fresh romance tipping into delirium. Its second half supplies the introspective comedown. “Can we still be friends/share a summer,” Lacy sings. A spoken-word outro follows, with Lacy thanking his past loves in the lucid haze of a club night’s electric close. “I gotta get the fuck outta here, y’all,” he tells us, before the breaks come crashing back in.

That’s it. The end. Love conquers all. Except Lacy doesn’t let the idea stand. The psych-rock postscript “Bebe” turns the catharsis of “In Your World” into a question mark, casting doubt on his certainty just as the album appears ready to resolve. The title has been telling us as much all along: not Oh Yeah, but Oh Yeah? — a declaration with doubt built in.