Steve Lacy on Oh Yeah?: Dead Dad, Queerness, Anxiety
SkimNews Take
A four-year gap after a breakthrough hit, reframed not as a creative drought but as the slow labor of processing grief, relationship loss, and anxiety—suggesting that "genius" narratives can obscure how much of artistic follow-through is just emotional survival.
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- Steve Lacy releases his third album Oh Yeah?, four years after his Grammy-winning Gemini Rights (2022), which has accumulated 2.8bn Spotify streams and produced the No. 1 US single Bad Habit.
- Oh Yeah? features a trip-hop track with Erykah Badu ('we talk on the 'gram all the time') and a song with Cecile Believe, the vocalist Lacy fixated on after discovering she sang on SOPHIE's posthumous album Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides.
- Lacy, who identifies as queer, says the album is inspired by a six-year on-and-off relationship and the 'sense of possibility' he felt before the heartbreak — calling trauma 'memorable.'
- Is It Cool? contains some of the most personal lyrics Lacy has ever sung, publicly revealing for the first time that his Filipino father died when Lacy was around 10: 'Tatay died when I was like 10 / I just cheat every now and again.'
- Anthony Fantano's punishing 3-out-of-10 review of Lacy's 2019 debut Apollo XXI punctured the 'genius' label he'd carried since his teens — what Lacy calls 'the greatest trick' — pushing him toward collaboration with Fousheé and Matt Martians.
- Lacy — whose cracked iPhone, used at 18 to produce Kendrick Lamar's Pride from the Pulitzer-winning Damn, now sits in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History — says he remains 'overdeveloped as a creative person' while still catching up on anxiety and 'silent' three-to-five-year crash-outs.
Why it matters: Lacy spent four years on Oh Yeah? after his No. 1 hit Bad Habit, trading 'genius' mythology for rawer, queer-tinged lyrics about his dead Filipino father. With 2.8bn Gemini Rights streams already behind him, the delay shows he prioritized emotional honesty over replicating the formula that made him famous.
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