The singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist makes sincerity and absurdity sound like neighboring impulses on his restless, intimate new album
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.
