The R&B group’s breakout stars launched new solo albums on the identical day — one leaning out of the highlight whereas the opposite confronts viral fame
Syd’s solo album Beard and Steve Lacy’s Oh yeah? discover the 2 members of R&B group The Web taking distinct approaches to refining their stardom.
Nabil / Gus Van Sant
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Nabil / Gus Van Sant
The specter of drifting aside has all the time loomed over The Web. The fusionist funk band emerged as a post-Odd Future fever dream, an inventive hydra whose abundance of cooks by no means appeared to remove from its relaxed and suave mix of R&B, rap, jazz and neo-soul, effervescent and alchemical as if brewed in a single smoldering cauldron. However ever since touchdown a shock Grammy nomination for its third album, 2015’s Ego Loss of life, the group has wrestled with competing drives: following impartial ambitions on the one hand, staying related on the opposite. A 2016 Fader cowl story highlighted this ethos of simultaneous collectivism and self-sufficiency, the members adamant about remaining a unit regardless of occurring hiatus to pursue particular person tasks. When Ego Loss of life‘s follow-up emerged in 2018, it was actually known as Hive Thoughts; “They gon’ get us to come back collectively,” went the opening hook. But because the title hinted, the unstated pressure was much less about retaining the lineup intact and extra about sustaining a fragile artistic fairness, the place nobody member’s artistic imaginative and prescient ever overshadows the others.
They have not come collectively since then, largely due to the mounting solo duties pulling them aside. Singer and de facto chief Syd launched her sophomore album, Damaged Hearts Membership, in 2022, and has co-written for Beyoncé twice. Co-founding producer and keyboardist Matt Martians has launched 4 albums of his personal, one fully self-produced. And within the midst of a second, extra prolonged group hiatus, the band underwent an sudden dynamic shift: Its most junior member, the singer and guitarist Steve Lacy, all of the sudden turned its most well-known in a single day, when TikTok turned his 2022 single “Dangerous Behavior” into one of many largest success tales of an period.
Martians and bassist Patrick Paige II function The Web’s sonic cornerstones, however Syd and Lacy are its primary characters. Syd is the frontperson, the fulcrum upon which the songs primarily flip; Lacy is the X issue, his addition little doubt the transfer that absolutely activated the band within the first place. (Maybe it is unfair to divide up Web albums into Earlier than Steve and After Steve durations, for the reason that different members’ progress actually fed that upward trajectory, however the group would not have an awesome album he is not on.) As soloists, each Syd and Lacy are queer artists at reverse ends of the identical R&B infinity pool, the previous reclining on a tanning ledge whereas the latter drifts right into a boundless expanse. These paths have intersected — Lacy produced Syd’s debut single in 2017 — however observe totally different inventive impulses. He leverages funk as a gateway to a hallucinatory soundscape, whereas she is laid again in embracing her kind, a lady-killer’s R&B with a sapphic twist.
4 years after its viral changeover, The Web’s charted course has hit one more bend. Each Steve Lacy and Syd launched new albums on July 17, although underneath very totally different circumstances: Lacy’s Oh yeah? needing to reply his meteoric breakthrough, Syd’s Beard slotting right into a extra under-the-radar arc and low-key evolution. The information usually really feel as if they’re in dialog with each other, not merely due to the thematic interaction, however in how they work out what it means to be a star.
Lacy, it will probably really feel like he turned a star accidentally, migrating from the 17-year-old taking part in guitar straight into his iPhone to prodigious backdoor producer on a Grammy-nominated document to chart-topping hitmaker. After all, he’d appeared poised for some sort of business reckoning since highschool, as a boy surprise with an iRig discovering his approach into periods with Kendrick Lamar, Kali Uchis and Vampire Weekend. However the viral attain of “Dangerous Behavior” pushed the artist from understated auteur to overexposed Gen-Z envoy, turning into the primary particular person to prime each the Sizzling R&B/Hip-Hop Songs and the Sizzling Rock & Different Songs charts. It is not a thriller why the track landed: Its hook — I want I knew, I want I knew you needed me — is an skilled stability of wistful and shrugging, good for an avoidant, doomscrolling public. Maintaining that very same public engaged, although, is a harder ask. After glimpsing the pop realm on the again of a nonchalant track that made the labor of pop songcraft appear absurd, there is not any subsequent transfer that does not contain doing battle with that paradox.
If Syd’s albums have all the time been assured of their deployment of a suave, noncommittal but lovestruck persona, Oh yeah? finds Lacy embracing his personal model of the character. “You ain’t gotta belief me to like me, child / Yeah, ‘trigger I do not even belief myself,” he sings on the SZA duet “is it cool?” He is a bisexual playboy who would not wish to cheat anymore, however he will not take accountability as a result of it is “simpler to hurry date.” “I may very well be alone, however I am attractive,” he admits on the second half of “good sneakers / in your world,” and that may be a main theme right here: The luxurious of being fascinating overrides any longing to commit, to 1 loving accomplice or to himself.
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These confessional songs, written from inside what Lacy refers to as “a freaked-out technology,” battle with a core stress: how you can meet the expectations foisted upon this document post-“Dangerous Behavior” whereas nonetheless capturing his goal vibe, itself a contradictory mixture of unfussy and technically grounded. Promo for the album has offered it as each extra private (a tried-and-true canine whistle for in search of deeper viewers funding) and extra stage-ready and sing-along pleasant. The music trades sturdy pop-funk for a muted, jangly, rock-inflected sound; the lyrics, as he put it in a Rolling Stone cowl story, are supposed to mirror what conversations with him are like, “a thought right here and one thing profound there, after which a joke proper after that.”
“Humorous” and “profound” are each states of being that require eloquence and instinct. Oh yeah? usually appears to succeed in for each directly, whereas clumsily deploying a sort of lurid intercourse discuss that may come off as puerile — a gambit that sadly leads Lacy away from the easy artistic model that originally charmed so many. At occasions he’ll try to flip a joke right into a penetrating revelation: “I am a giant child sucking on massive t*****s / Karma’s a bitch and I guess she’s fairly,” he sings on “doom.” Elsewhere, he turns a self-deprecating jab right into a critique of our screen-swiping romantic panorama, treating his pals like a carousel of potential paramours. Younger individuals are having much less intercourse, the world is in the midst of a conservative revival, and a puritanical streak has run by in style tradition — so it’s, on its face, refreshing to listen to an artist write about intimacy and eroticism in such a lewd and indelicate approach, as messy however value exploring. The document might even be learn as an embrace of gauche sensibilities: Being sexy for somebody might be sort of embarrassing, and edginess is one option to grapple with that stress. However amid all its delirious randiness, the album’s gestures at informal knowledge and tongue-in-cheek frivolity merely appear past its main man.
For his personal half, Lacy has dismissed any accountability to make good on his latest hype. “I do not drink the Kool-Assist as a result of I am a scholar first earlier than something,” he informed Rolling Stone, outlining a idea of pop music extra tied to elusory cultural influences than style identification or chart affect, and pointing to Frank Ocean and Solange among the many profession fashions he’d prefer to emulate. These careers have been constructed on meticulous consideration to element, a way of route and a transparent emphasis on prudence, ingratiating listeners who then hitched their wagons to a little bit motion. This album, whilst a piece trying to resonate deeply with a cult following, would not learn as the identical sort of star flip. And possibly that is fantastic: Lacy by no means requested to be a phenom, and this method could also be a tacit acknowledgement that “Dangerous Behavior” is a little bit of a curse he’d prefer to crawl out from underneath. “I do not obsess over first-week gross sales or regardless of the f*** individuals care about as a result of I simply wish to be on the street and I wish to be on big excursions,” he informed Excellent journal. “I do not actually really feel that well-known — I really feel extra common than I really feel well-known. I really feel fantastic, I really feel chill.”
In just a few noticeable methods, Syd’s album pulls off precisely what Oh yeah? is greedy for: an indifferently profound look contained in the doomed state of recent romance from one among its typical suspects, a serial cheater, returning to the scene of the crime. Beard additionally sells its creator as a extra absolutely realized artist — it is the primary album Syd has co-produced in its entirety — however does in order a refined reconsideration of the character she has all the time been in her music. “I do know I is usually a menace / Kind of inconsistent typically / Make you query your opinions / I do know I be trippin’, do not lie,” she sings on “Jasmin 17,” accepting her function in her romantic misadventures.
Syd enters this part of her profession from a place inverse to Lacy’s. The place her bandmate should now reconcile the pressures of visibility with the mystique of taking life in stride, she cuts the determine of an effortlessly cool, if-you-know-you-know hotshot. “These days, all people is aware of us / Looks as if I’ve completed a lot / However inside, I have been feelin’ so rushed,” she murmurs close to the tip of album nearer “2 Many Days.” There’s something unflashy about her presentation that runs counter to being out entrance and spotlit. As she places it on “Callin,” “I do not actually be out on the scene / Sittin’ within the part all evening, that s*** ain’t for me.” The inconspicuous power that has made her star high quality straightforward to miss may be what makes her music so charming, the songs carried out with an unpretentious mastery that builds to breakthroughs by itself phrases.
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That does not cease Beard from paying off a long-gestating developmental arc by marrying the worlds of two her earlier albums, the playa jams of 2017’s Fin and the unrequited balladry of Damaged Hearts Membership, in each sound and subject material, resulting in a extra embodied work that offers actual that means to “self-produced.” Flitting from Afrobeats (“Jasmin 17”) and bossa nova (“My Love“) to watercolor Darkchild R&B (“Dangerous Guys“) and synth soul (“Any Time“), its scope reads as a mark of her command. Lyrically, she by no means strays removed from the consolation of her love nest, introduced as each sanctuary and siren’s lair. “Look me in my face / Once I say I would like you / Safer at my place / I am solely considering of you,” she sings on “My Love,” a veiled manipulation. She makes area for a lover’s issues on “Closet,” so {that a} tryst may change into a full-blown fling. She is a reformed pick-up artist (OK, possibly reforming, however she’s engaged on it), therefore the squelching “Do Higher,” a little bit of self-talk on breaking the cycle.
But even when conflicted, she’s by no means ruffled, and her songwriting is so sharp it makes gaslighting and love bombing really feel not solely romantic however vital. Listening, you’re feeling her magnetism simply as a lot as the ladies she’s courting should.
In a latest interview with Popcast, the three central members of The Web introduced plans to launch a bunch album in 2027. Martians defined that the document was made on and off over the past 5 years, taking form round their numerous solo endeavors. “We wish to do issues that are not cash performs with The Web. That is a part of the rationale why we did our solo factor, so once we come to The Web, we are able to do issues we predict are cool,” he stated, a seeming admission that their work as people comes with sure careerist necessities.
However he additionally pointed to a extra sensible worth: “Having that launch valve for a band is a vital factor, as a result of it permits you to have the ability to get your concepts out and never really feel shuttered. That is the symbiosis of how they each work collectively and do not ever conflict into one another.” That framing — “launch valve” — helps clarify sense of this crew’s course of, the solo albums taking ego stress off the collaborative efforts.
If nothing else, you possibly can really feel in each of those new albums the artists getting their concepts out, beholden to nobody however themselves. However there may be additionally a way that “solo” just isn’t a mode separate from being a part of a staff, that the hive thoughts is about utilizing particular person identities for the sake of a unified intelligence. The grandest takeaway from ingesting Oh yeah? and Beard collectively is imagining the improved collective energy that may end result from Steve Lacy and Syd coming collectively once more. Even aside, it feels as if they’re on the identical wave, in dialog, working their approach again to one another.
