‘Oh Yeah?’ by Steve Lacy
★★★★
“With Oh Yeah?, Steve Lacy makes his strongest claim yet to being one of Gen Z’s defining pop auteurs,” said Jeff Ihaza in Rolling Stone. The 28-year-old Grammy winner, whose previous album included the No. 1 hit “Bad Habit,” has returned four years later with another “genre-splicing” album that weds melodic rock with experimental R&B, “turning guitar ballads, trip-hop murk, and crude-almost-cringe humor into a pop language unmistakably his own.” Lacy racked up a raft of credits as a songwriter, guitarist, and producer before his solo breakout, said Chris DeVille in Stereogum, and here, “songs seem to spill out of him with ease.” Because Oh Yeah? “moves with a pleasing looseness,” it feels less like a bid for a pop smash than “an unguarded look into the mind of a musical prodigy as he matures into a career artist, exploring the nuances of modern romance and queer sexuality with newfound clarity.” The lyrics, to my ear, are “consistently terrible.” But Lacy’s “half-baked” poetry “contributes to the album’s free-flowing vibe” and none of Oh Yeah?’s clunker lines derail its emergence as “one of the most purely enjoyable albums of the year.”
‘Daughter From Hell’ by Gracie Abrams
★★
Much of Gracie Abrams’ latest album “feels both incredibly intense and frustratingly vague,” said Molly Mary O’Brien in Pitchfork. “She is sick, she is numb, she is bleeding, she is burning up,” but “the feelings are always more distinct than whatever happened to cause them,” and it’s “hard not to wish for a slight shake-up from her signature sound.” Abrams, the 26-year-old daughter of producer-director J.J. Abrams, has created a blend of “bulletproof pop” and “melancholic indie folk” that landed her 2024 sophomore album at No. 2 on Billboard’s chart, but after a while, all the breathy verses and fingerpicked guitar lines “stand in the way of music that could be more memorable.” While “songs of emotional candor depend on total authenticity,” said Will Hodgkinson in The Times (U.K.), Daughter From Hell “just doesn’t get there.” Abrams’ chart success, following in the wake of Adele and Taylor Swift, “feels like the logical conclusion to the commercialization of emotional frailty in pop.” Yet she’s more effective “when she stops trying to sound all tortured and deep.” That’s why “Minibar,” a “fun, catchy sing-along,” is also “the best track on the album.”
‘New Avatar’ by Kelela
★★★
The music Kelela has made since her 2013 debut “always feels like it’s going somewhere,” said Luke Cartledge in Paste. On the third album from the 43-year-old R&B maverick, “the adventurism and intellect that have made her music so exciting remain,” yet “they’re complemented by a sense of lightness and self-assurance that feel new.” Where her past work felt tightly wound, this album “swings, flutters, and breathes,” establishing itself as “one of the best pop albums of the year.” New Avatar “marks a full-circle moment for Kelela,” said Paul Simpson in AllMusic. As might be suggested by the “shoegaze-like” guitars on “Idea 1,” this record’s “stunning” opener, she started out playing in D.C. indie bands before her move to L.A. and toward club-based music. Echoes of that passion can be heard in the slowed breakbeats of “Point Blank” and the “airy” garage beat of the PinkPantheress-assisted “The Bridge.” But while the album fuses multiple styles, it’s “more about atmospheric vibes and urgent lyrics than pop hooks or cutting-edge dance rhythms.” It’s “easily Kelela’s darkest release to date.” Somehow, though, it “manages to be comforting.”