The R&B group’s breakout stars released new solo albums on the same day — one leaning out of the spotlight while the other confronts viral fame
Syd’s solo album Beard and Steve Lacy’s Oh yeah? find the two members of R&B group The Internet taking distinct approaches to refining their stardom.
Nabil / Gus Van Sant
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Nabil / Gus Van Sant
The threat of drifting apart has always loomed over The Internet. The fusionist funk band emerged as a post-Odd Future fever dream, an artistic hydra whose abundance of cooks never seemed to take away from its relaxed and artful blend of R&B, rap, jazz and neo-soul, bubbling and alchemical as if brewed in a single smoldering cauldron. But ever since landing a surprise Grammy nomination for its third album, 2015’s Ego Death, the group has wrestled with competing drives: following independent ambitions on the one hand, staying connected on the other. A 2016 Fader cover story highlighted this ethos of simultaneous collectivism and self-sufficiency, the members adamant about remaining a unit despite going on hiatus to pursue individual projects. When Ego Death‘s follow-up emerged in 2018, it was literally called Hive Mind; “They gon’ get us to come together,” went the opening hook. Yet as the title hinted, the unspoken strain was less about keeping the lineup intact and more about maintaining a delicate creative equity, where no one member’s creative vision ever overshadows the others.
They haven’t come together since then, in large part because of the mounting solo responsibilities pulling them apart. Singer and de facto leader Syd released her sophomore album, Broken Hearts Club, in 2022, and has co-written for Beyoncé twice. Co-founding producer and keyboardist Matt Martians has released four albums of his own, one entirely self-produced. And in the midst of a second, more extended group hiatus, the band underwent an unexpected dynamic shift: Its most junior member, the singer and guitarist Steve Lacy, suddenly became its most famous overnight, when TikTok turned his 2022 single “Bad Habit” into one of the biggest success stories of an era.
Martians and bassist Patrick Paige II serve as The Internet’s sonic cornerstones, but Syd and Lacy are its main characters. Syd is the frontperson, the fulcrum upon which the songs primarily turn; Lacy is the X factor, his addition no doubt the move that fully activated the band in the first place. (Perhaps it’s unfair to divide up Internet albums into Before Steve and After Steve periods, since the other members’ growth certainly fed that upward trajectory, but the group doesn’t have a great album he isn’t on.) As soloists, both Syd and Lacy are queer artists at opposite ends of the same R&B infinity pool, the former reclining on a tanning ledge while the latter drifts into a boundless expanse. Those paths have intersected — Lacy produced Syd’s debut single in 2017 — but follow different artistic impulses. He leverages funk as a gateway to a hallucinatory soundscape, while she is laid back in embracing her form, a lady-killer’s R&B with a sapphic twist.
Four years after its viral changeover, The Internet’s charted course has hit yet another bend. Both Steve Lacy and Syd released new albums on July 17, though under very different circumstances: Lacy’s Oh yeah? needing to answer his meteoric breakthrough, Syd’s Beard slotting into a more under-the-radar arc and low-key evolution. The records often feel as if they are in conversation with one another, not simply because of the thematic interplay, but in how they work out what it means to be a star.
Looking at Lacy, it can feel like he became a star by accident, migrating from the 17-year-old playing guitar directly into his iPhone to prodigious backdoor producer on a Grammy-nominated record to chart-topping hitmaker. Of course, he’d seemed poised for some kind of industry reckoning since high school, as a boy wonder with an iRig finding his way into sessions with Kendrick Lamar, Kali Uchis and Vampire Weekend. But the viral reach of “Bad Habit” pushed the artist from understated auteur to overexposed Gen-Z envoy, becoming the first person to top both the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs and the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs charts. It isn’t a mystery why the song landed: Its hook — I wish I knew, I wish I knew you wanted me — is an expert balance of wistful and shrugging, perfect for an avoidant, doomscrolling public. Keeping that same public engaged, though, is a tougher ask. After glimpsing the pop realm on the back of a nonchalant song that made the labor of pop songcraft seem absurd, there’s no next move that doesn’t involve doing battle with that paradox.
If Syd’s albums have always been assured in their deployment of a suave, noncommittal yet lovestruck persona, Oh yeah? finds Lacy embracing his own version of the character. “You ain’t gotta trust me to love me, baby / Yeah, ’cause I don’t even trust myself,” he sings on the SZA duet “is it cool?” He’s a bisexual playboy who doesn’t want to cheat anymore, but he won’t take accountability because it’s “easier to speed date.” “I could be alone, but I’m sexy,” he admits on the second half of “nice shoes / in your world,” and that is a major theme here: The luxury of being desirable overrides any longing to commit, to one loving partner or to himself.
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These confessional songs, written from inside what Lacy refers to as “a freaked-out generation,” struggle with a core tension: how to meet the expectations foisted upon this record post-“Bad Habit” while still capturing his target vibe, itself a contradictory mix of unfussy and technically grounded. Promo for the album has sold it as both more personal (a tried-and-true dog whistle for seeking deeper audience investment) and more stage-ready and sing-along friendly. The music trades robust pop-funk for a muted, jangly, rock-inflected sound; the lyrics, as he put it in a Rolling Stone cover story, are meant to reflect what conversations with him are like, “a thought here and something profound there, and then a joke right after that.”
“Funny” and “profound” are both states of being that require eloquence and intuition. Oh yeah? often seems to reach for both at once, while clumsily deploying a kind of lurid sex talk that can come off as puerile — a gambit that unfortunately leads Lacy away from the effortless creative style that initially charmed so many. At times he’ll attempt to flip a joke into a penetrating revelation: “I’m a big baby sucking on big t*****s / Karma’s a bitch and I bet she’s pretty,” he sings on “doom.” Elsewhere, he turns a self-deprecating jab into a critique of our screen-swiping romantic landscape, treating his friends like a carousel of potential paramours. Young people are having less sex, the world is in the middle of a conservative revival, and a puritanical streak has run through popular culture — so it is, on its face, refreshing to hear an artist write about intimacy and eroticism in such a lewd and indelicate way, as messy but worth exploring. The record could even be read as an embrace of gauche sensibilities: Being horny for someone can be kind of embarrassing, and edginess is one way to grapple with that tension. But amid all its delirious randiness, the album’s gestures at casual wisdom and tongue-in-cheek frivolity simply seem beyond its leading man.
For his own part, Lacy has brushed off any responsibility to make good on his recent hype. “I don’t drink the Kool-Aid because I’m a student first before anything,” he told Rolling Stone, outlining a theory of pop music more tied to elusory cultural influences than genre identity or chart impact, and pointing to Frank Ocean and Solange among the career models he’d like to emulate. Those careers were built on meticulous attention to detail, a sense of direction and a clear emphasis on prudence, ingratiating listeners who then hitched their wagons to a little movement. This album, even as a work looking to resonate deeply with a cult following, doesn’t read as the same kind of star turn. And maybe that’s fine: Lacy never asked to be a phenom, and this approach may be a tacit acknowledgement that “Bad Habit” is a bit of a curse he’d like to crawl out from under. “I don’t obsess over first-week sales or whatever the f*** people care about because I just want to be on the road and I want to be on huge tours,” he told Perfect magazine. “I don’t really feel that famous — I feel more regular than I feel famous. I feel fine, I feel chill.”
In a few noticeable ways, Syd’s album pulls off exactly what Oh yeah? is grasping for: an indifferently profound look inside the doomed state of modern romance from one of its usual suspects, a serial cheater, returning to the scene of the crime. Beard also sells its creator as a more fully realized artist — it’s the first album Syd has co-produced in its entirety — but does so as a subtle reconsideration of the character she has always been in her music. “I know I can be a menace / Sort of inconsistent sometimes / Make you question your opinions / I know I be trippin’, don’t lie,” she sings on “Jasmin 17,” accepting her role in her romantic misadventures.
Syd enters this phase of her career from a position inverse to Lacy’s. Where her bandmate must now reconcile the pressures of visibility with the mystique of taking life in stride, she cuts the figure of an effortlessly cool, if-you-know-you-know hotshot. “Nowadays, everybody knows us / Seems like I’ve accomplished so much / But inside, I’ve been feelin’ so rushed,” she murmurs near the end of album closer “2 Many Days.” There is something unflashy about her presentation that runs counter to being out front and spotlit. As she puts it on “Callin,” “I don’t really be out on the scene / Sittin’ in the section all night, that s*** ain’t for me.” The inconspicuous energy that has made her star quality easy to overlook may also be what makes her music so captivating, the songs performed with an unpretentious mastery that builds to breakthroughs on its own terms.
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That doesn’t stop Beard from paying off a long-gestating developmental arc by marrying the worlds of two her previous albums, the playa jams of 2017’s Fin and the unrequited balladry of Broken Hearts Club, in both sound and subject matter, leading to a more embodied work that gives real meaning to “self-produced.” Flitting from Afrobeats (“Jasmin 17”) and bossa nova (“My Love“) to watercolor Darkchild R&B (“Bad Guys“) and synth soul (“Any Time“), its scope reads as a mark of her command. Lyrically, she never strays far from the comfort of her love nest, presented as both sanctuary and siren’s lair. “Look me in my face / When I say I want you / Safer at my place / I’m only thinking of you,” she sings on “My Love,” a veiled manipulation. She makes space for a lover’s things on “Closet,” so that a tryst might become a full-blown fling. She is a reformed pick-up artist (OK, maybe reforming, but she’s working on it), hence the squelching “Do Better,” a bit of self-talk on breaking the cycle.
Yet even when conflicted, she’s never ruffled, and her songwriting is so sharp it makes gaslighting and love bombing feel not only romantic but necessary. Listening, you feel her magnetism just as much as the women she’s courting must.
In a recent interview with Popcast, the three central members of The Internet announced plans to release a group album in 2027. Martians explained that the record was made on and off over the last five years, taking shape around their various solo endeavors. “We want to do things that aren’t money plays with The Internet. That’s part of the reason why we did our solo thing, so when we come to The Internet, we can do things we think are cool,” he said, a seeming admission that their work as individuals comes with certain careerist requirements.
But he also pointed to a more practical value: “Having that release valve for a band is a very important thing, because it allows you to be able to get your ideas out and not feel shuttered. That’s the symbiosis of how they both work together and don’t ever clash into each other.” That framing — “release valve” — helps make clear sense of this crew’s process, the solo albums taking ego pressure off the collaborative efforts.
If nothing else, you can feel in both of these new albums the artists getting their ideas out, beholden to no one but themselves. But there is also a sense that “solo” is not a mode separate from being part of a team, that the hive mind is about using individual identities for the sake of a unified intelligence. The grandest takeaway from ingesting Oh yeah? and Beard together is imagining the enhanced collective power that might result from Steve Lacy and Syd coming together again. Even apart, it feels as if they are on the same wave, in conversation, working their way back to each other.
