By Joe Mendoza

The year after the release of his debut studio album, Apollo XXI in 2019, Lacy followed up with another intriguing album, The Lo-fis, which is composed of 15 tracks, ranging from 43 second songs to more normal, 3 minute songs. After the technical beginning of his career, Steve has stayed true to his philosophy of making music he likes and enjoys, and being sure to experiment with his sound, and with this album he continues this. He starts the album off with a confident track, boasting about his demeanor while at a party(Atomic Vomit), where two tracks later, it’s a more melancholy song describing the nature of change, and leaving people behind in That’s no Fun. 

He shifts his tone and manipulates the topics of his songs all throughout the album, highlighting the versatility he has, although he still manages to keep the same themes of love and loss in all of these tracks. In Jars of It, Infrunami, and Uuuu, he uses one or two verse songs to put out the message of his love for this girl with interesting and appealing lyrics, like in Infrunami, where he sings:

 “Girl, you’re the one I want 

You’re the one I need I’m beggin’ you, please 

Can you come back to me?

 ‘Cause I was blind to see 

That you were right in front of me”

He puts his vocals on display, as well as manipulating it to sound more “crazed”, like in songs like 4real, where he sings of how “Sometimes I hate you/ Sometimes you kill”, where three lines later, he concludes that they’re “Perfect for each other, yeah, we’re both insane”. The tracklist put together by Lacy in this album immediately became big with his fans, since the same themes in Apollo XXII and Steve Lacy’s Demo are explored, yet also creates such a diverse set of tracks that really hit the listener hard. With all the short track times, with the average time around a minute and a half, Lacy jumps from one theme to the next within a short amount of time, strengthening his place as a legitimate music artist, following up two successful projects with another.