Steve Lacy's new album ends with a doubt. After 10 songs about the plausibility of love, the psych-rock postscript “Bebe” turns the catharsis of the nine-minute “Nice Shoes / In Your World” into a question mark, which is, Rolling Stone's reviewer notes, exactly what the title has been telling us all along. Not Oh Yeah, but Oh Yeah?: “a declaration with doubt built in.”
It's the first album from Lacy since 2022's Gemini Rights, per Complex. That record, which won the Grammy for Best Progressive R&B Album and spawned the No. 1 hit “Bad Habit,” made him a pop name, and he has two songs, “Bad Habit” and “Dark Red,” with more than a billion Spotify streams. Oh yeah?, out July 17 on RCA, is written, performed and produced entirely by Lacy, and press materials call it “a record for guitar kids who love synths and synth kids who love guitars.”
Words first
The biggest change is that he cares about the lyrics now. Lacy came up producing for The Internet, handing off beats and hooks without much thought for words, he told Rolling Stone last August when he announced the album. “Now I'm like, ‘OK, I want to say shit how I would say shit,’” he said, in a quote Complex carried.
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That shows. Rolling Stone says the songs are held together by Lacy's “crazy-ass lyrics,” and the review is delighted by the gap between his bluntest lines and the ice-cream-sweet choruses they sit in. He sounds like he's reading you a voice note. Pitchfork hears “the vulnerability of a diarist” and a guitar that can “sweep you up in nostalgia or transport you to forbidden memories of torrid love affairs.”
A guest list built on influence
Three guests carry the album's romance. SZA turns up on “Is It Cool?”, and Rolling Stone says both artists share “a knack for candidly unhinged hooks forged in the heat of romance.” Erykah Badu, whom Lacy first named as an inspiration in 2016, appears on “Pure Colour,” a dubby, bass-heavy track on which Rolling Stone says you might swear you'd landed on a Portishead record. And Montreal artist Cecile Believe, best known for her work with the late producer SOPHIE and the subject of Lacy's raving in his cover-story interview, adds a second hook to “Lovesexdrugbomb.”
The first official single, “the feeling,” is a patient bass-line ballad whose chorus asks, “Am I your baby?” The video was directed by Matthew Castellanos. Rolling Stone's pick for a secret mainstream hit is “Show You Me,” where the guitar returns and the humor is at its crudest.
What he changed to make it
The process changed too. Lacy told The Cut that the success of “Bad Habit” gave him leverage with RCA, and he told Rolling Stone he didn't try to chase it.
Anyone else in my position would be like, 'Ride this wave,' but I know I'm going to be here for a little bit. I ain't worried about that shit.
Steve Lacy, to Rolling Stone, Complex
He also cleaned up, and says it helped. “I stopped drinking coffee and taking edibles, and I wrote an insane verse,” he said, per Complex. “This is the first album where I'm fully present in my body.” He recorded a good portion of it in Paris, where he said he felt “at home in foreign countries and situations and less at home at home.” He cut off his signature braids around the rollout, a visual reset to match.
Where it fits
Rolling Stone takes up the comparison that's the subject of ongoing TikTok debate, Frank Ocean's decade-old Blonde, which also fused its creator's many influences into a coherent, at times profoundly moving body of work. With Oh Yeah?, it says, Lacy makes his strongest claim yet to being one of Gen Z's defining pop auteurs. It's also a quieter record than Gemini Rights, working at what the review calls “a more subtle register” than that album's pop maximalism.
It arrived the same Friday as Syd's Beard, another Internet alum's solo album, per Pitchfork, in a week Billboard called “particularly packed” for albums, with Gracie Abrams leading the guide. All three are part of our guide to July's best new music. The week before, Baby Rose's Yearnalism made a quieter case for R&B's next wave (story).
Oh yeah?Steve LacyListen on Apple Music
What's next: The Internet's long-awaited new album, which Rolling Stone says is on the way, and whatever Lacy does with a question mark.
- Album
- Oh yeah?, July 17, 2026
- Label
- RCA Records
- Tracks
- 10, all written and produced by Lacy
- Guests
- SZA, Erykah Badu, Cecile Believe
Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.
