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.
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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.
