The pop-star magic of 2022’s massive “Bad Habit,” one of the defining hits of the TikTok era, is that it’s a big, professional smash that doesn’t really sound like one. The unexpected breakout from Steve Lacy’s Grammy-winning Gemini Rights widened the scope of his ditzy, talky demos while hanging onto the looseness of a guy freestyling in his childhood bedroom. Compared to the old stuff he used to drop on his own when he was mainly known as the youngin’ ripping the guitar in the R&B band the Internet, “Bad Habit” isn’t nearly as diaristic or cheeky, but it captures the casual awkwardness and embarrassment of having a crush. With hummable melodies and a killer guitar riff, it does so in a way that is both personal without saying much and universal without trying hard to be. There’s a lot of dudes out here that would sell their soul for an uncomplicated yet complicated jam just like that.
But “Bad Habit” definitely wasn’t banged out in one session, even if it sounds like one of those moments of accidental genius you’d see in a musical biopic—you know, Bob Dylan pulling up to the studio with an electric guitar on a whim or Snoop and Dre coming up with “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” (ad-libs and everything) on the fly. With star-whisperers in the cut—Fousheé, Diana Gordon, and John Carroll Kirby—Lacy workshopped the track for “probably a year” to get it to sound so effortless. That spirit of a tinkering boy wonder dropped into the industry machine seems to come along for Oh yeah?, Lacy’s first album in four years, which is doing a lot of work to scale up the musical palette and keep it chill at the same time. It doesn’t come off as organic as it did on “Bad Habit.” You can see the strategy in motion.
It can take me out of an album when I’m thinking more about what an artist wants me to feel rather than actually feeling it. In the case of Oh yeah?, the problem is stuffy and inconsistent writing about breakups, sex, and new love that’s too cliché to apply to your own life and too vague to imagine as his. He’s stuck in no man’s land. The synthy dream-pop intro “oh yeah?,” where he’s picking himself up out of the dumps, is so serious and yet the lyrics have no personality. His heart doesn’t seem to be in the dick jokes on “nice shoes,” but maybe that’s more the fault of his sauceless drum’n’bass rhythm and groggy MCing. If he had a little life when he said it, the overthought TikTok-bio motivation wouldn’t sound so bad: “Life is but a stain, it’s not a tattoo/Temporary pain, it’s lame to chase youth.” On the in-one-ear-out-the-other “the feeling,” his Maxwell-lite begging goes down smooth but feels vacant: He can’t live without his ex but we don’t know why other than he can’t. He’s staring at their photos but we don’t know what he finds so hot about them other than he does. Not until the cheesy boyband outro does he give anything to grab onto—how they used to fuck on the carpet, the time in 2019 when they stayed at an Airbnb—but it comes too late.
All the best Steve Lacy songs have a sort of laid-back himbo wit to them. The clever hook of 2017’s “Ryd” was all about trying to get ass in the backseat of his car; “Cody Freestyle” was basically his version of a horny, atmospheric, name-dropping The-Dream ballad. On Oh yeah? that off-the-cuff humor doesn’t seem to come as instinctively, but he’s naturally funny and a little bit mean when he takes the guardrails off the relationship stories. “Dump him and then find you once again/We break up, OK, go suck your friend’s dick,” during the warped breakdown of “lovesexdrugbomb,” froze me with its Future-like wickedness. Toward the start of “in your world”—the brighter second half of “nice shoes,” which is nine minutes long for whatever reason—he hits us with the comically honest, “I could be alone, but I’m sexy,” which fits the I’m-hurt-but-pretending-not-to-be comeback arc. Better than his attempt to psychoanalyze his How to Be a Player ways on “is it cool?,” a by-the-books collab with SZA and generic roaring N.E.R.D. guitars.
Some jokes feel forced, as if added after the fact to try to lighten the mood. The bit about “coochie stuck in my teeth” on “show you me” sticks out as unnecessary because the rest of the acoustic guitar singalong is kinda breathtaking with the way flirty conversation scraps (“What you on tonight?/Are you even gay?”) meet gentle pledges of “I can show you me” that go from playful to terrifying in seconds. It’s a moving song about putting yourself out there. On the other hand, the Weezer-ish nerd-rock of “doom” is some bullshit. I’d rag on the line “I’m a big baby suckin’ on big titties,” but the real earsore is, “Life in the freaked-out generation/Everybody fuckin’, but nobody gives a/Fuck ’bout love, just validation.” This broad and plainspoken love is hard gobbledygook is where you can really sense the pressure not just to come up with another not-so-obvious chart-topper but also to be the romantic sounding board of his generation.
I’m not surprised to hear Lacy scrapped two entire albums before landing on Oh yeah? The flip-flopping between fragmented breakup anthems with bite and formulaic moodboard fodder makes it feel like he’s pretty confused about how much of himself he has to let go of to be a pop star. It’s hard to fully take in the songs once you notice the compromises. My favorite tracks tend to be the ones that snap me into a daze so deep I temporarily forget about those mechanics. In the spellbound wooing of “bebe,” he nails down his magnetic draw to another person so informally: “I think you’re cute and a baddie, of course.” In the trippy heart-aching of “pure colour,” he describes his desire for his ex as “deep as hell” and beams in Erykah Badu like a fairy godmother. “nothing” shakes up his romantic R&B pipes with thirsty TikTok lingo: “When we don’t speak for a while, I get feral.” None of these will be the next “Bad Habit,” but these are the Steve Lacy songs that sound easy.
