Steve Lacy Told Us How ‘Oh Yeah?’ Would Happen. We Just Had to Wait a Year

When Steve Lacy first started letting people hear Oh Yeah?, the album was much sadder.

“They were sad,” he told me last summer, recalling an early listening session with his label. “They were like, ‘All right, now play some happier ones.’ And I was like, ‘Fuck.’”

At the time, Lacy was still working through the aftermath of a breakup. The songs circled mistrust, self-sabotage, longing, and the feeling of discovering that you had been carrying sadness without fully recognizing it. But Oh Yeah? was being made in real time, and before he could finish it, his life began moving somewhere else.

“The story writes itself,” Lacy said then in a conversation for his Rolling Stone cover story. “I feel like my job is really just, it’s such an abstract mindset when you’re in album mode. It’s hard to explain to anybody because technically I’m free, but I feel very busy waiting for that moment that might come to me.”

By the time we met in Paris last June, that moment was beginning to arrive. Lacy had recently met someone new and described himself as “crushing again,” “feeling romantic again,” and “feeling open again.” The change was already finding its way into the music.

“It’s all together,” he said. “So it’s like a story that starts and gets completed, but it happens in real time. I’m not making it up.”

Lacy had begun working almost immediately after Gemini Rights, his Grammy-winning 2022 breakthrough album, but for much of the next few years, he couldn’t find the finished record inside everything he was making. He thought he had found it more than once.

“There’s moments of fake ease,” he said. “Thought it was coming, but it was like, ‘This is not it,’ like three times… I thought I had it. And God was like, ‘Nope.’”

Each attempt to force the album into shape sent him back to the songs. “I think when you try to seek what’s too early, you get humbled,” he said. “I got humbled a couple times.” Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

Eventually, he stopped trying to determine the structure of the album before the writing was complete.

“Stop trying to sequence the fucking music,” he remembered telling himself. “Just write the songs. So now I’m just writing. And then once that’s happening, I sort out the story.”

That process lasted nearly three years. Lacy continued making music on the road, at home in Los Angeles, at the Village studio, and during extended stays in Paris. He described the experience as learning his craft all over again.

“This has been a two-, three-year process, man, of just fucking practicing, waking up, just making sounds,” he said. “It feels like I’ve taught myself how to make songs again. Because I think every album cycle, I feel like a different person by the end, and what I want out of songs changes.”

This was also, he said, “one of the hardest albums to make.”

“What I want out of new music changes every week,” he said. “I’m like, ‘I want to make what I want out of music.’”

For most of his career, Lacy considered himself a producer and musician before a lyricist. As part of the band the Internet, he would build an instrumental, come up with a hook, and hand the song off. “Words were always just kind of secondary,” he said. “I’m like, ‘If my beat hard, this bassline hard, the chords hard, what else do we need?’” Related Content Steve Lacy Proves He’s One of His Era’s Defining Pop Auteurs With ‘Oh Yeah?’ Steve Lacy and SZA Have Commitment Issues on Confessional New Song ‘Is It Cool?’ Taylor Swift, Flo, Shaboozey, and All the Songs You Need to Know This Week Steve Lacy Teases New Album With Lovelorn Single ‘The Feeling’

On Oh Yeah?, he began approaching language with the same obsessive attention he once reserved for drums, chords, and bass.

“This is kind of my first album where I’m consciously thinking about writing every day,” he said. “It feels like fully designing a new language for myself, as far as how I’m speaking about things and how open I am to speaking about things.”

He rewrote verses, recorded different versions, and considered how individual words landed against the production.

“I’m really sitting with it and being like, ‘This is a cool sentence conceptually, but it’s not hitting a good snare,’” he said. “So I’m kind of mixing how to say something that I want to say, but also sound selection like a producer. So these words sound really good.”

He described the songwriting as “patient, thorough, direct, funny.”

“I think I’m even funnier on this one,” he said. “Funny but also introspective. I’ll have a joke and then a line that makes you want to cry after.”

One of the first songs to emerge clearly from that language was “Nice Shoes.” Lacy had been sitting on the beat for a while when he decided it should accompany the Rolling Stone cover and introduce the album’s new sound. He didn’t want to release an unrelated track simply because he needed a single.

“I didn’t want to just drop a loosie of something that I just had lying around,” he said. “So I heard this beat that I’ve had for a little bit, and I had a little flow on it already. I said, ‘This feels like the first thing.’ So I was like, ‘I’d rather intentionally write something for this moment.’ Magazine coverage just comes and treat it like a trailer to the shit.”

The song became “Nice Shoes,” and on the finished album it stretches into “Nice Shoes / In Your World,” a nine-minute centerpiece that moves from a frantic electronic break into a slower guitar passage.

The electronic sound wasn’t an abrupt pivot for Lacy. Flying Lotus and Thundercat had first drawn him toward that world, and he had spent years DJing and following dance music. But he had resisted incorporating it too directly into his own work.

“Things I respect and love so much, I don’t feel like I want to touch,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Ah, there are people that are so good at this. I don’t even want to enter this unless I could find a way to do it that feels authentic to me.’”

The beat, he said, felt like “its own little blobby thing.”

Part of its atmosphere came from Lacy’s own nightlife. He recalled going to Ostbahnhof, a gay party in Los Angeles, where River Moon was DJing. Afterward, the group moved to another party that Lacy found disappointing, so he brought a smaller group back to his place. He and Moon played music together until morning.

“We went to my spot and I had CDJs set up and we DJ’d till 10 a.m.,” he said. “It was a solid group of fucking 12, 13 people. The music was so fucking good.”