WASHINGTON – Although on the fast track to stardom, Steve Lacy is a big believer in taking it easy. The artist’s most famous song, “Bad Habit,” which spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 this fall and is nominated for Record and Song of the Year at the Grammys, is a case in point.
It took Lacy almost a year to make it, incrementally adding new segments and textures, taking it off the shelf and putting it back on. The improbable-looking transitions — from post-punk chants to boy band chants to hip-hop drum loops — are the source of the song’s infectious vitality. A less patient process would have produced a different number and result.
“It took months of listening to it to figure out what was missing,” Lacy said in an interview recently at a hotel overlooking the Washington Monument. “I wasn’t sure about that number for a long time, and one day it was like, OK, here it is.”
“Bad Habit” went viral on TikTok, where the song’s hooky chorus (“I wish I know/I wish I know you wanted me”) appears in over 700,000 videos. Lacy’s second album, “Gemini Rights,” released in July, reached the Top 10 on the Billboard 200, with nearly 485 million streams on Spotify alone. In October, he embarked on a sold-out 40-date international tour; the following month he performed on “Saturday Night Live”.
On a short tour in December, 24-year-old Lacy was in town to be celebrated at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. He’s model proportions—seen in a Marc Jacobs campaign this spring—and showed up for our interview in a fully zipped black leather biker jacket and black leather pants that spoke as loud as anything on his album. His generally soft voice dissolved into a whisper when he was forced to say something that would make him sound like he looked, that is, like a rock star.
Lacy is on the verge of the kind of fame that tests the character of a young artist. A year ago, he was an independent singer, songwriter, and producer with a modest following, best known for his work with bigger collaborators, including Solange, Kendrick Lamar, and Vampire Weekend. Now his name appears on Billboard charts and Grammy ballots alongside those of Harry Styles, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. The safety of relative anonymity is a fast-fading memory, and every step toward the celebrity he’s becoming could mean the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end.
“It’s cool that your music speaks to so many people, but it’s terrifying at the same time,” Lacy said. “Everyone has an opinion about you, but they don’t really know who you are.”
Despite his youth, Lacy is essentially a late bloomer among his particular cohort of post-streaming pop music insurgents. He started out as a songwriter more than seven years ago as a member of the Los Angeles-based alternative R&B collective Internet, an offshoot of the rap conglomerate Odd Future. He was 16 at the time and a classmate of Jameel Bruner, then the Internet’s keyboardist and younger brother of eclectic bassist Thundercat.
Born and raised in Compton, California, Lacy started playing guitar when he was 10, the same year his father died. His stepfather noticed his obsession with the Guitar Hero video game and bought him a Squier Stratocaster. Lacy’s mother, a nurse who once had her own dreams of becoming a singer (she and Lacy’s three sisters sing backup on both of his albums) sent him to George Washington Preparatory High School in South Los Angeles to study in the well-known jazz band.
Lacy met Bruner in the band and soon devoted every free moment to music. In addition to the daily lessons, before school, after school, and during lunch, he and Bruner stopped by the band room to jam. Their teacher, Emerson Cardenas, remembers Lacy as a musical “sponge” with a distinct fashion sense.
“Everyone else would be wearing Jordans and Steve would show up in loafers and a cardigan,” Cardenas said. “He was very advanced, even as a freshman. But he was never outspoken or seeking the spotlight. He was extremely modest, as if he had nothing to prove.”
Around the time he hit the internet, Lacy decided to make music full-time. He was nominated for his first Grammy in 2015 – while still a senior at Washington Prep – for the group’s breakthrough album, “Ego Death”, which credits Lacy as an executive producer. His mother, Valerie, said he made a cunning argument for postponing college that appealed to her future singing career.
“He said, ‘Mom, your mistake was you put a percentage into plan B that you should have put into plan A,'” Valerie said. “‘I want to try and put everything into plan A.'”
After “Ego Death”, Lacy began working on his own music, encouraged by Syd and Matt Martians from the Internet. He didn’t set out to become a solo artist—his main passions were playing the guitar and making beats, often on a falling iPhone—but collected six short but evocative songs that he dubbed “Steve Lacy’s Demo.”” released in 2017.
At once innovative and deeply recognizable, the music borrowed from and recontextualized the soulful lust of Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, the slacker mystique of Mac DeMarco and Kurt Vile, and the otherworldly funk of Pharrell Williams and André 3000. The collection’s standout single , “Dark Red,” revealed Lacy’s knack for highly quotable lyrics (the opening line, “Something bad’s about to happen to me,” is Charlie Kaufman meets Charlie Brown) and became a sleepy hit online, racking up nearly 700 million streams to date on Spotify.
Lacy began to attract the attention of a wider range of artists in the Los Angeles area. The producer DJ Dahi, who worked with him during sessions for the Kendrick Lamar album ‘Damn.” and Vampire Weekend’s “Father of the Bride” said he was impressed with Lacy’s seemingly effortless ability to play music in any genre.
“He’s like a walking encyclopedia,” said DJ Dahi. “He’ll make a song that’s just him and it’ll still have something for everyone.”
Lacy self-released his debut solo album ‘Apollo XXI’ in 2019, shadowing the adventurous terrain he outlined on ‘Steve Lacy’s Demo’. But it wasn’t until “Gemini Rights” that he felt he had found his voice as an artist.
“I always want to stand behind my music, not for it,” Lacy said, taking his time choosing his words. “But this time I really forced myself to be more assertive and just trust my decisions.”
The breakout success of “Bad Habit”, which Lacy described as his most successful attempt yet at putting himself all into one song, confirmed his instincts. Written after a breakup with a friend, the stylistic promiscuity mirrors his own journey to self-acceptance.
“It started out as this really clean, alternative rock song,” Lacy said. He added the jagged hip-hopper cussion as both a narrative exclamation mark and an affirmation of his Blackness, which he typified by using an unprintable word.
While the song’s virality changed his career, it also triggered one of Lacy’s biggest fears: that he would only be known as a one-hit wonder. That fear increased after a video taken at one of his concerts showing fans don’t remember the lyrics to the song’s second verse traveled widely on social media. Lacy said he was initially upset by the incident, and besides, some media outlets and online commentators tried to portray it as a broad indictment of his popularity. But he said he eventually recognized the episode as part of the inevitable price of fame.
“At a certain point you become like a commodity, and there are things about that that are annoying,” he said. “But I love my music and I know I have so many more ideas, so I’m not too into my feelings about it.”
After our interview, Lacy, his mother, and his best friend, Alan Lear, visited the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. The entire Lacy clan was in town for a gala commemorating the opening of the new “Entertainment Nation” exhibit, featuring an iPhone that Lacy used to create some of his earliest music as one of dozens of historic cultural artifacts.
Wearing another leather jacket (vintage Celine) and rectangular glasses, he posed next to the telephone as guests, including Gloria Estefan and the secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, rummaged through the displays wearing the original Kermit the Frog doll, a fedora hat wearing Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones and one of Prince’s electric guitars, among other cult objects.
The museum first contacted Lacy by phone in 2017 after one of the curators read about it in Wired magazine. Lacy said the exhibition, which will run for at least 20 years, had him more excited than any of his many rising awards.
“This would have happened whether ‘Bad Habit’ had exploded or not,” he said clearly delighted. “It feels like pure tuning in.”