Songfacts®:

• "Is It Cool?" finds Steve Lacy confronting a difficult truth: he wants lasting love but keeps undermining it himself. Featuring SZA, the song is a candid conversation about emotional immaturity, infidelity, and the lingering effects of childhood grief.
• Instead of searching for excuses, Lacy wonders whether someone can love him despite the parts of himself he hasn't yet figured out how to fix. It's a brave question, if not necessarily the sort of thing that improves the mood at dinner.
  
  SZA answers in the second verse from the partner's perspective. Rather than condemning Lacy, she suggests they bypass the conversation entirely and skip straight to the bedroom.
• The collaboration grew out of a series of sessions Lacy and SZA held during 2025. SZA told i-D magazine they were making "a random little project" together, with a live band working through ideas while she freestyled melodies. She described the music as "awesome humanity s--t" that made her feel "insufferably human," an apt description for a song that wears its flaws so openly.
• Lacy begins with one of the most revealing verses of his career:
  
  Never needed a man
  Tatay died when I was like 10
  I turned out to be just fine
  I just cheat every now and again
  
  "Tatay" is the Tagalog word for "father," reflecting Lacy's Filipino heritage. When he posted the lyric on Instagram, he wrote, "how it felt writing the first 4 bars about tatay dying when I was 10 and cheating sometimes. Pray for me y'all." The humor is disarming, but the confession isn't. Lacy links his serial infidelity to the loss of his father, suggesting that the emotional damage runs deeper than simple restlessness.
  
  The opening four lines took months to arrive. Then, according to Lacy, the words suddenly came out without warning. "I've never said anything about being Filipino ever, or anything about my dad being dead," he told The Guardian. "It wasn't premeditated or anything."
  
  Lacy was in the studio with Fousheé and Martians when he delivered the lyrics. Their reaction was understandably less "great, let's get that on the record" and more "are you all right, mate?"
  
  "They looked at me like: 'Bruh, are you good? Do you need a hug?'" Lacy recalled. His response was considerably more upbeat: "'Nah, I'm ramped up! Let's go!'"
• The outro boils everything down to the title's deceptively casual question. "Is it cool?" really means, Can you accept me even when I know I'm making a mess of this? It's the kind of casual, almost deflecting phrasing Lacy uses to raise something deeply serious while maintaining emotional distance, a hallmark of his lyrical style, seen also in "Bad Habit" (where romantic failure becomes a personal quirk), "Static" (where hurt is masked by cool detachment), "Dark Red" (where fear of abandonment hides behind symbolic imagery), and "The Feeling" (where the entire song stalls before finally dropping its one vulnerable question).
• Released as the third single from Oh Yeah?, after "Nice Shoes" and "The Feeling," "Is It Cool?" continues the album's exploration of intimacy and self-sabotage.
• Lacy wrote the song alongside SZA, Matthew Castellanos, and Fousheé, with production handled by Lacy, Matt Martians, and Karl Wingate. The track serves as a reunion of sorts, bringing together a tight-knit circle of longtime collaborators.
  
  Martians, a founding member of The Internet, mentored Lacy when he joined the band as a teenager; this was his first official production credit on one of Lacy's solo tracks.
  
  Castellanos and Fousheé are the same team behind Lacy's breakthrough hit "Bad Habit." Fousheé also adds backing vocals alongside Ravyn Lenae, continuing a creative shorthand that stretches back to Lenae's 2018 EP Crush, which Lacy produced in full.