Steve Lacy Makes Himself at Home at Radio City Music Hall

Seven years after first seeing him perform with The Internet, I caught Steve Lacy at Radio City for a show that reminded me just how much we've grown alongside his music.

A lot has changed since I first saw Steve Lacy perform with The Internet at Gov Ball in 2019. Seven years and three solo albums later, the 28-year-old musician took the stage at Radio City Music Hall in New York City this past weekend for his Oh Yeah? Tour.

Steve onstage with The Internet at their 2019 Gov Ball set.

This was my third time seeing Steve live. After Gov Ball came his 2022 Give You The World Tour, when I saw him in a less-than-enjoyable, packed-to-the-brim Terminal 5. It was right after the release of Gemini Rights and right in the middle of the TikTok frenzy surrounding “Bad Habit,” which had seemingly taken over everyone’s For You Page and was turning Steve into a household name. 

Unfortunately, there was no opener this time around. Steve is the type of person who would have a cool-ass opener, so this felt like a loss. In 2022, it was Fousheé. While there was no one warming up the crowd at Radio City, Steve didn’t really need it.

Songs that once felt small enough to be made in 18-year-old Steve’s bedroom on an iPhone filled a theater as iconic as Radio City with no problem. He famously produced some of his earliest work on his phone, and there's still something intimate about his music, even when thousands of people are singing it back to him.

The scale of the show may have changed, but so has Steve. For male performers specifically, I sometimes find myself wanting more when it comes to stage presence, but Steve has no problem holding the room. He's become incredibly comfortable being watched, and it’s clear that he loves the attention. At one point, he literally stopped to flex and pose shirtless while seemingly every phone in Radio City went up. He was clearly having fun with the crowd throughout the night, joking around and playing off their reactions. During “doom,” he even extended the ending, repeating “shut the fuck up” for what felt like minutes.

Beyond his personality driven stage presence, Steve’s musicianship spoke for itself. His vocals were impressive throughout the night, and he could go from messing around with the crowd to completely locking in on a song without missing a beat. 

The setlist also included a cover of The Smiths' “This Night Has Opened My Eyes” and a guest performance from Fousheé to perform their collaboration “Sunshine,” just as she did on his 2022 tour. It was a nice callback to the last time I saw him live.

One of the most interesting parts of the night, though, was the way he structured the show. Steve played the entirety of Oh Yeah? From front to back, in order. It’s something I’ve only ever seen one other artist do– Anderson .Paak on his Malibu anniversary tour – and I appreciated Steve’s decision to give the album that same treatment.

While Anderson .Paak was celebrating an album that had already cemented its place in his discography, Steve was asking the audience to give his newest material their full attention, allowing the project to be digested as he intended. Rather than breaking up the new songs with older hits, Steve made the album the main event. 

Once he finished the album’s tracklist, the rest of the show became a reminder of how extensive Steve’s catalog has become. The arrangement of older songs took us on a walk through his career, and hearing those songs after the new album made his evolution as an artist especially clear. The guy I first saw playing guitar with The Internet seven years ago now has enough solo material to fill Radio City Music Hall, with plenty of songs leftover that fans were disappointed couldn’t fit into the setlist.

I also appreciated his choice of encore. After performing the new album in full and making his way through older fan favorites, Steve returned to the stage to perform “Oh Yeah?” and “The Feeling” for a second time. Both songs have become favorites off the new record, and I liked that he chose to close the night by revisiting his newest material rather than relying on one of his older hits. The crowd was just as excited to hear them again as they were the first time around, which speaks to how well the new album has been received.

Steve performing oh yeah? during the encore of his New York tour stop.

When I first saw Steve in 2019, he had just turned 21 the week before. Now he's 28, standing alone at the center of the Radio City Music Hall stage with an entirely fleshed-out catalog under his belt.

It wasn’t just Steve who got older, his audience did too. 

There’s something special about following an artist who’s around your own age. Their music inevitably becomes tied to different periods of your own life; the people who discovered Steve in high school or college aren’t those same people anymore. We’ve graduated, moved, started careers, ended relationships, started new ones and generally figured out (or at least attended to) our twenties while Steve was doing the same and sharing his experience with us through his music.

The rooms got bigger, the songs got bigger and we got older. Somehow, the music still feels just as intimate as it did when he was making it on an iPhone.