Steve Lacy: Gemini Rights — a breezy break-up album

Steve Lacy disproves the notion that today’s TikTok-addled youths have the listening capacity of mayflies, unable to follow a song for longer than a minute and apt to become befuddled by anything more complex than a catchy hook. When the Californian played in London in 2019, he was greeted by screams and people singing along word for word. Yet his music was unpredictable and mazy. It demanded sustained attention.

Lacy, 24, has emerged from a loose-knit music scene based on the US west coast that unites the often disparate attributes of success and unorthodoxy. He co-produced a song on Kendrick Lamar’s album Damn when he was 18. By then, he had already spent several years as guitarist in R&B group The Internet, an offshoot from LA rap collective Odd Future. Labels such as “prodigy” and “polymath” have been attached to him — with unhelpful consequences, like the moments on his 2019 debut Apollo XXI when tracks would meander through a prodigious array of tempo changes and switches in melody.

Gemini Rights is his second studio album. It finds him applying his musical talents with a greater degree of discipline. The tracks tell the story of a break-up, starting with “Static”’s harsh portrait of a cocaine-taking ex-boyfriend, sung in a discordant singsong by Lacy. Characteristically, he switches abruptly to a more vulnerable mode during the course of the song, announced by warmer vocal melodies.

“Helmet” ups the tempo with a thrumming 1970s soul routine and raspy yet mellifluous singing. “Mercury” is psychedelic bossa nova, elaborately conceived but blithely executed. “Buttons” has a woozy, soulful charm. “Cody Freestyle” recounts the collapse of the relationship over dirge-like washes of sound. The song doesn’t really work: Lacy is more comfortable evoking emotional breeziness than heaviness. But it epitomises his refusal to take the easy musical route.

★★★☆☆

‘Gemini Rights’ is released by RCA Records