Growing out of ‘Bad Habit’
Artist Lacy has gone from cult favorite a year ago to vying for Grammys against Beyonce, Styles, Swift
Although he has found himself on the fast track to stardom, Steve Lacy is a big believer in taking things slowly. The artist’s most famous song, “Bad Habit,” which spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the fall and is nominated for record and song of the year at the Grammys, is a prime example.
Lacy spent nearly a year making it, incrementally adding new segments and textures, pulling it down from the shelf and putting it back again. Its improbable-seeming transitions — from post-punk jangle to boy-band crooning to hip-hop drum loops — are the source of the track’s infectious vitality. A less patient process would have produced a different song, and a different outcome.
“It took months of listening to it, figuring out what was missing,” Lacy said recently. “I wasn’t sure about that song for the longest time, and then one day it was like, OK, here it is.”
“Bad Habit” went viral on TikTok, where the song’s hooky refrain (“I wish I knew/ I wish I knew you wanted me”) appears in more than 700,000 videos. Lacy’s second album, “Gemini Rights,” released in July, cracked the Top 10 of the Billboard 200, with its hit song racking up nearly 485 million streams on Spotify alone. In October, he embarked on a soldout, 40-date international tour; the next month, he performed on “Saturday Night Live.”
Lacy, 24, is on the cusp of the kind of fame that tests a young artist’s character. A year ago, he was an independent singer, songwriter and producer with a modest following, known mostly for his work with bigger collaborators, including Solange,
Kendrick Lamar and Vampire Weekend. Now, his name appears on Billboard charts and Grammy ballots next to those of Harry Styles, Beyonce and Taylor Swift. The safety of relative anonymity is a fastfading memory, and each step toward the celebrity he is becoming could mean either the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end.
“It’s cool to have your music connect with 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 got his start as a songwriter more than seven years ago, as a member of the Los Angeles-based alternative R&B collective the 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 the younger brother of eclectic bassist Thundercat.
Lacy was born and raised in Compton, California, and began playing guitar when he was 10, the same year that his father died. His stepfather noticed his obsession with the video game “Guitar Hero” 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 its noted jazz band.
Around the time that he joined the Internet, Lacy decided to pursue 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 shrewd argument for delaying college that invoked her would-have-been singing career.
“He said, ‘Mom, your mistake was that you put a percentage in Plan B that you should have put into Plan A,’ ” she said. “‘I want to try putting everything into Plan A.’ ”
After “Ego Death,” Lacy began working on his own music, encouraged by Syd and Matt Martians of the Internet. He hadn’t planned on being a solo artist — his main passions were playing guitar and making beats, often on a disintegrating iPhone — but assembled six short but evocative songs that he called “Steve Lacy’s Demo,” released in 2017.
The music was at once innovative and highly recognizable, borrowing from and recontextualizing the soulful lust of Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, the slacker mysticism of Mac DeMarco and Kurt Vile, and the alien funk of Pharrell Williams and Andre 3000. The collection’s standout single, “Dark Red,” revealed Lacy’s talent for highly quotable lyrics (the opening line, “Something bad’s about to happen to me,” is Charlie Kaufman meets Charlie Brown) and became a sleeper hit online, with nearly 700 million streams on Spotify to date.
Lacy independently released his debut solo album, “Apollo XXI,” in 2019, shading in 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, rather than in front of it,” Lacy said. “But this time I really pushed myself to be more assertive and just trust in my decisions.”
The breakout success of “Bad Habit,” which Lacy described as his most successful attempt yet at putting all of his selves into a single song, validated his instincts. Written after a breakup with a boyfriend, its stylistic promiscuity mirrors his own journey to self-acceptance.
“It started out as this really clean, alternative rock song,” Lacy said. He added the serrated hip-hop percussion as both a narrative exclamation point and an affirmation of his Blackness.
Although the song’s virality transformed his career, it also triggered one of Lacy’s greatest fears: that he would only ever be known as a one-hit wonder.
That anxiety increased after a video taken at one of his concerts showing fans failing to recall the lyrics to the song’s second verse traveled widely on social media. Lacy said he was initially upset by the incident, and by the way some media outlets and online commentators tried to portray it as a broad indictment of his popularity. But he said he ultimately 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 like my music, and I know that I have so many more ideas, so I’m not too in my feelings about it.”