Steve Lacy walks the tightrope of love on his new album 'oh yeah'

Steve Lacy’s third studio album feels like a punch to the gut. You’re in for a suffocated throat, tear-welling eyes mixed with the rawness of developing feelings - with some catchy dance breaks thrown in there. 

The work is a limbo of caution and throwing yourself into the deep end. Running on ten tracks and the hazards of uncertainty, it details the complexity of personal histories when it comes to getting involved with someone else. Only at the end do you understand the placement of ‘oh yeah?’ as the first title, and why it gives the album its name. It almost feels like a psychedelic umbrella, slow and rhythmic; as the “Cmon, cmon, cmons” mimic the act of Lacy trying to pull himself together, accepting the fact that “life’s a bitch / and then you live again.” All these instances are but a part of it all. 

In one of the leading singles, ‘is it cool? (feat. SZA)’, the Gemini Rights singer tackles the fervor of falling for someone, pleading for reassurance and asking for permission to go for it, almost as a way to derive the fault from oneself. His voice blends with SZA’s, serving as conversation between the two singers. 

Anyone who’s ever been in a situationship (which is, at this point, most of us) will feel like this album was personally crafted for them. It is this deep desire for reciprocation that we find in ‘show you me,’ a folk-RnB ballad that opposes the ‘chill’ persona we wish to project to its reality: feeling so much, and wanting the other person to feel that way, too.  A few tracks later, ‘nothing’ really twists the knife even deeper. It is the gruesome situation of being fully aware of the imbalance of infatuation and knowingly staying stuck there, all on the strumming of a guitar. He details scenes one might know all too well, of a lack of communication yet deciding to settle for it: “Really don't like silence / When we don't speak for a while, I get feral / Like I'm out of water.”

In ‘nice shoes / in your world’, Lacy uses the first part to highlight the buzzing, scrabbling headache that love gives us, while the second sounds like coming off of a bad trip, recentering and rebuilding trust in oneself and one's intuition after so much self-doubt.

Got crazy intuition like a woman
I always see it coming
Let's face it, I've been a little hasted
Forgot what it's like to feel real love
Life's a bitch
And then you live again
Non-confront, avoidant, lonely coward
Excuse me while I spiral downwards

‘bebe,’ is a good conclusion to the story, and the album. It reads exactly like a fairy tale, starting with his own version of ‘Once upon a time,’ –  "You put me under your spell tonight / With your fairy dust, ass, and black magic.” – to concluding with “That's the story 'bout the time I got my life screwed up.” It echoes an earlier track, ‘the feeling,’ with both mentioning leaving his heart either on the floor or on his sleeve, up for grabs. 

Steve has ignored his intuition and is bearing the repercussions. We find so many instances in which he acknowledges that he sees the smoke, like “something’s burning / i smell fire,” yet actively clings to his muse. The universe could be throwing all kinds of signs at you, which personally I’m the first one to follow, but I’ve realised that just because they’re there doesn’t mean you have to follow them. oh yeah depicts the gray area of dating and romance, the feelings we don’t actively voice but write in our diary. By the time we loop back to our title track, ‘oh yeah’ reads more like exhaustion. He walks on no moral high ground; he doesn’t offer listeners a solution or a fleshed-out conclusion, but leaves the mess on a platter for us to digest. 

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