Concert preview
Steve Lacy spent years making music that sounded private enough to overhear. On Saturday, it has to fill Radio City.
Steve Lacy performing at the Rialto Theatre in 2022. Photo: C Elliott/Wikimedia Commons, CC0.
Lacy brings the Oh yeah? Tour to Radio City Music Hall on Oct. 10, behind the third solo album he released in July. The ten-song record follows Gemini Rights, the 2022 album that included “Bad Habit” and turned Lacy from a musician’s musician into a pop star with a very peculiar relationship to scale.
His music has always depended on compression. Guitar figures repeat until they become hooks. A vocal can sound tossed off, then reveal that it has been engineered down to the breath. Songs end sooner than conventional pop wisdom says they should. Even after “Bad Habit” became enormous, Lacy’s work retained the atmosphere of a bedroom where somebody happens to have left the door open.
After the hit
Oh yeah? is a useful record to tour because it does not chase the obvious sequel. The album includes “is it cool?,” a collaboration with SZA, and moves through guitar music, R&B, pop and brief flashes of electronic rhythm without pausing to announce the transitions. Lacy sounds interested in desire again, but less dazzled by it.
That mood could be difficult in a room like Radio City. The hall rewards gesture. Lacy’s music often rewards the opposite, the half-sung line, the clipped phrase, the guitar part that sounds almost too small until it repeats. The question is whether he enlarges the songs or makes the audience come closer to them.
The second option would be more interesting. Lacy’s career has developed in an era when a song can leap from headphone intimacy to stadium familiarity without changing shape. “Bad Habit” became a mass-cultural object while still sounding slightly unfinished, which was part of its charm. It did not ask permission to become big.
Radio City gives him a chance to test what came after that accident of scale. He is no longer the young producer quietly accumulating credits, nor simply the singer of one giant single. At twenty-eight, he has a catalog long enough to complicate the shorthand around him.
The room may help. Radio City can make performers look tiny, but it can also turn concentration into theater. Lacy’s best songs have always depended on the confidence to leave space where another artist would add more sound. On Saturday, the empty parts may be the ones worth listening for.
Steve Lacy: Oh Yeah? Tour
Saturday, Oct. 10, 8 p.m.
Radio City Music Hall, 1260 Sixth Avenue
