A new-age guitar god melts disparate genres into a unified expression of desire. When we last heard from Steve Lacy, he was busy releasing his 2022 sophomore album, Gemini Rights—a refined but groovy collage of rock, funk, and R&B led by “Bad Habit,” a runaway hit that topped five of Billboard’s genre charts at once. Lacy had already established himself as a quiet creative force, having produced songs for Solange and Kendrick Lamar from his bedroom and earning his first Grammy nomination at age 17 for his role as guitarist on The Internet’s Ego Death. But it was Gemini Rights that introduced Lacy as a bona fide solo talent—a new-age guitar god, at once an old soul and a voice of his generation. True to form, Lacy kept private in the years since that album, reemerging in August 2025 with a new single, “Nice Shoes,” and a seductively vague title for his third album: Oh yeah? Like its predecessor, the collection’s concise 10 tracks belie how expansive its ideas can be, melting its disparate genres into a unified expression of desire. Lacy explores his signature themes of lust and longing from all angles—alternately wistful and jaded and carnal, blurring the lines between lover and friend. True to life, confusion abounds: Over the grungy nihilism of “doom,” he laments a social landscape where people chase validation rather than connection, while the SZA duet “is it cool?” has the singer tiring of vulnerability and wishing he could just get naked. Lacy’s exploration of what it means to connect in 2026 is full of pleasant surprises, from the two minutes of jungle breaks that conclude the two-part expansion of “nice shoes / in your world” to the most unique pronunciation of the word “edible” you’ll hear on “bebe.”