Steve Lacy sets his third album 'Oh yeah?' for July 17 and shares lead single 'the feeling'

Steve Lacy finally put a date on it. His third album, Oh yeah?, arrives July 17 on RCA Records, and the lead single "the feeling" is out now with a video directed by Matt Castellanos.

The wait has been long enough that "the feeling" almost counts as a return. Gemini Rights came out in July 2022 and sent "Bad Habit" to the top of the Hot 100, which is not a normal thing to happen to a bedroom guitarist who came up in The Internet. Since then Lacy has kept the next record close. He put out "Nice Shoes" last August as a kind of flare, then went quiet again. This is the first single that arrives with a release date attached.

The single

"the feeling" is a breakup song that refuses to play it cool. The bass walks, the guitar keeps its funk-adjacent bounce, and Lacy spends the whole thing pressing on a bruise. "The heart takes what it wants / I'm not scared to bleed, you know our history," he sings, before landing on a hook that asks a question it already knows the answer to: "Am I your baby? Am I your baby?" It sits closer to the widescreen Lacy of Gemini Rights than the lo-fi sketches he used to toss onto Bandcamp, and the writing carries more weight than it once did.

That last part is deliberate. "When I first started making shit or producing stuff with the Internet, I would always make the beat, make a hook, and just give it away," Lacy told Rolling Stone. "Words were always just kind of secondary... But now I'm like, 'OK, I want to say shit how I would say shit.'"

Four years, much of it in Paris

RCA's press notes frame Oh yeah? as the end of a four-year stretch in which Lacy felt more at home in foreign countries than at home, handling the production, writing, performance and creative direction himself before finding his way back. He recorded part of the album in Paris and told Rolling Stone the city did something for him. "I love the color of all the beiges and the lights and how old everything is, even the lighting at night," he said. "It's just the vibe."

The one-line pitch in the press materials is the most Lacy thing about the rollout: "It's a record for guitar kids who love synths and synth kids who love guitars." He has spent his whole career in that overlap, a guitar player who thinks like a producer, and the line suggests he is done running from it.

What to watch

The real question is whether Lacy can follow a crossover hit without either chasing it or apologizing for it. "Bad Habit" made him a pop name almost by accident, and plenty of artists flinch on the record that comes next. "the feeling" does not flinch. It sounds like a bigger song made by someone who decided the lyrics were worth sweating. Whether the rest of Oh yeah? holds that line is the thing to listen for on July 17.