Since Steve Lacy became a Grammy-winning artist with a No 1 hit in the US, little has changed for him. His single Bad Habit was one of the biggest songs of 2022, leading to a sold-out tour across North America, Europe and Australia. But off-stage? He bought a new home in Los Angeles, but he hasn’t made any new famous friends. He doesn’t get hounded in public, because he’s a natural homebody. Besides, he’s not really that famous, is he?
“I think my name is bigger than my face, which is great,” he says, smiling mischievously. Sitting in a private room in a London hotel, wearing a Serge Gainsbourg T-shirt and jeans so ripped that they might as well be shorts, Lacy says he thinks he has pulled off the greatest trick of modern pop stardom: being one of the most celebrated musicians of his generation while remaining almost unrecognisable.
There is some truth to this. Thanks to the collaged portrait on the cover of his 2022 album, Gemini Rights, many of the listeners responsible for its 2.8bn Spotify streams probably have no clear idea of what he looks like. But the fan who spotted him on the way to our interview did. “Oh, she posted!” Lacy leans over to show me their selfie on Instagram, with a caption calling him the Goat (greatest of all time). He grins.
Perhaps the real reason the 28-year-old’s life feels so normal to him now is because it hasn’t been ordinary since he was in his teens: he was revered by music obsessives long before he hit the mainstream. After teaching himself to play the guitar as a child, he received his first Grammy nomination at 17, as part of the alt-R&B band the Internet alongside Syd, and went to school the day after the ceremony. A year later, he produced Kendrick Lamar’s track Pride, from the Pulitzer-winning album Damn, using an iPhone. In 2022, that same, cracked phone was displayed at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Nile Rodgers once called him “innovation personified”. Other words that have followed Lacy around over the past decade include “prodigy”, “wunderkind” and “genius”.
“Well, you know what? That shit got debunked,” says Lacy. Again, he looks amused, maybe even a little relieved. The genius myth was punctured, he says, by YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano, who rated his debut solo album, 2019’s Apollo XXI, a three out of 10. “That pissed me off, but I needed it,” he says. Lacy speaks softly and frequently folds one tattooed arm to hold the other, but his face is always animated – especially when he has a point to prove.
“I was definitely gassed the fuck up as a teenager, like I thought I was perfect.” Up until then, Lacy had worked on his solo music alone. His first taste of negative criticism opened him up to the ideal of collaboration, inviting other musicians into the process, such as singer Fousheé and his Internet bandmate Matt Martians. “By the time I started working on Gemini Rights, I had become bored with myself – I know my choices too well.” He then “fell in love with the communal aspect of songwriting. We’re supposed to do this shit together, you know?”
He has been absorbing the work of other artists, too. Lacy is in London to promote his highly anticipated third album Oh Yeah?, but so far, he has mostly spent his time shopping for books, searching for a novel to replace his latest read, All Fours by Miranda July. He has picked up more books by female and queer authors, including Love in Exile by Shon Faye, Palaver by Bryan Washington and Michelle Tea’s anthology Sluts. Lacy has always enjoyed reading, but this new ferocious appetite coincides with a more intentional approach to lyricism. “I’ve gotten a little bit more intense in all parts, I guess,” he says. On previous records, “I just wanted the beat to hit and the chorus to be cute,” he says. Now, he refuses to “just say anything” for the sake of a hook. That’s partly why Oh Yeah? has taken so long.
Lacy didn’t mean to spend four years making it. And he certainly didn’t take a break. “I’m not a vacation guy,” he smiles wryly. “Making music brings me so much joy, so that’s one part of it. Then people who post vacations make me never want to go on vacation. Like, what else do you do? Vacation is not a personality, bro.”
Instead, Lacy makes – or at least thinks about – his songs every day, creating out of compulsion more than discipline. When the Gemini Rights hype died down, after it won best progressive R&B album at the 2023 Grammys, he set a self-imposed deadline for his next album, 20 April 2024 (AKA 4/20, US weed smokers’ annual day of celebration). He probably could have released something. “I had a group of songs that I thought were cool,” he says. “But there were still things I needed to learn about myself, about music. So I just kept going.”
A year later, his record label tried nudging the process along. Out came Lacy’s breakbeat-infused single Nice Shoes, alongside a Rolling Stone cover story which teased more new music. “I think the record company thought it would fuel me to finish my album,” he smiles ruefully. “But that’s not how it works.” So, he carried on, relistening to songs an “absurd” amount, obsessively tweaking anything that “bugs me”. Finally, enough was enough. “I was like: I’m gonna be working on this for ever. I’ve got to make some decisions.”
It is no surprise, then, that Lacy describes Oh Yeah? as his “most engineered” and “most complete” album yet. He says he is not trying to replicate the success of Bad Habit, but he wants to match its energy – an unpolished, accidental pop hit that sits somewhere in between psychedelic indie and off-kilter R&B. Its influence can be heard everywhere: overtly in the music of artists such as the billion-streaming US singer-songwriter Malcom Todd, who is often called the “white Steve Lacy”; more subtly in audiences’ increasing appetite for scuzzy guitar sounds and unconventional song structures. For Lacy, the greatest lesson he learned from Bad Habit’s popularity was that his eccentricity didn’t have to limit him to being a “niche” artist. “Gemini Rights showed me how far things could go,” he says. “I didn’t care about going No 1 until I got to No 2.” Now, he’s writing songs with headline bookings in mind. “Without being super corny about it,” he clarifies. “It’s still got all my quirks and stuff.”
There is a trip-hop track featuring Erykah Badu (“we talk on the ’gram all the time,” he says) and an unrequited love song featuring Cecile Believe, with whom Lacy became obsessed after discovering she was the vocalist on Sophie’s album Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides (“she’s kind of like a human synthesiser”). Despite all the reworkings, the music hasn’t lost the magic of Gemini Rights, somehow sounding technically sophisticated and lovingly homemade at the same time. The lyrics, however, are noticeably less guarded – even the ones he agonised over. The four opening lines for Is It Cool?, for example, took months to arrive. Then, one day, he suddenly blurted out some of the most revealing lyrics he has ever sung: “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.”
Lacy was born in Compton, California, to an African American mother and a Filipino father who was largely absent before his death. “Tatay” means dad in Tagalog. “I’ve never said anything about being Filipino ever, or anything about my dad being dead,” he says. He still seems shocked that the lines came out of his mouth. “It wasn’t premeditated or anything.” He was in the studio with Foushée and Martians at the time. “They looked at me like: ‘Bruh, are you good? Do you need a hug?’ I was like: ‘Nah, I’m ramped up! Let’s go!’”
Lacy has a habit of doing this: stumbling into gut-wrenching emotional truths – like connecting infidelity to childhood trauma – in the guise of deadpan humour. “There’s a lot of comedy throughout the album but I’m covering some deep stuff,” he says. Other deceptively silly lines include “I’m a big baby sucking on big titties” and “Everybody fucking, but nobody gives a fuck” on the slacker rock track Doom. The “scary things” he admits on Oh Yeah? are the result of his emotional growth over the past few years. “I think I’m overdeveloped as a creative person – not like ‘I’m the greatest artist’, but in comparison to how I’m developed in a human sense, when it comes to working through conflicts, depression or anxiety,” he says.
He says he sometimes tricks himself into thinking that everything is fine when he is spiralling into anxiety. “My chaos is kind of silent,” he says. “I could be crashing out for, like, three to five years and I don’t even know it’s happening.”
A lot of Lacy’s crash-outs have happened in response to love affairs ending. Gemini Rights was ostensibly a breakup album, but that relationship, it turns out, was only a rebound from the one that he is still writing about six years after it ended. “Oh Yeah? is about that person – well, not that person, fuck that person! This album’s inspired by that breakup,” he says. It’s been a long, on-and-off relationship, but Lacy, who identifies as queer, is more interested in mourning the sense of possibility he felt when they were first together. “[The feeling of] getting with someone before you can even really get hurt was inspiring in many ways,” he says. “Trauma is memorable.” He pauses, then bursts into laughter. “I’d spent so much time running away from it, but it’s still gonna pop up until you sit with that shit.”
It’s also harder to fall in love like a teenager when you have a big, grownup job to do. “When I was 19, I would do acid on a Wednesday. I don’t have time for that shit any more. Being with that person represented a certain freedom. Now everything’s more structured. I’m a boss and everyone’s looking for me to answer things and execute big ideas.”
Maybe success has changed his life after all. For a while, Lacy yearned to be in a power couple. “I thought I need to be a fan of the person. But that’s stupid,” he says. Writing Oh Yeah? helped him understand that emotional safety in a relationship is more important. “I realised how big my ego had gotten about love.” He laughs at himself. “When it comes to who I’m going to commit to, I have such huge OCD about how they should show up and what I want the love to look like, so I had to get over myself there.” Lacy begins to explain how something – or someone – helped him arrive at that conclusion. Then, he catches himself, playfully grabs the phone that’s recording our conversation and pretends to hit pause. “I don’t want to talk about this on record …”
Another topic that is supposed to be off-limits is the fact that he smashed a fan’s disposable camera after objects were thrown at him on stage during his last tour in 2022. It became a surprisingly big story. Shortly after, on Instagram, he explained that the outburst was the product of his frustration with unruly audiences. “Maybe I could’ve reacted better? Sure,” he wrote. “But I’m a real person with real feelings.” His publicist had asked me to avoid mentioning it, but Lacy brings it up anyway – at least to illustrate how news stories can distort the truth.
At the time, it was widely misreported that he had smashed the fan’s phone. He is conscious that certain lines from Oh Yeah? might be similarly misinterpreted. “There could definitely be potential for a headline thing to happen, where they take something out of context,” he says. “[When the camera story went viral] that’s when I thought: oh shit, I must be famous.” So he is famous? “I have famous moments, but I don’t feel like a famous person.”
Growing up, all he wanted to do was play guitar. “I think about that all the time,” he says. “I cried in the car the other day listening to the album. I was like, wow, I can’t believe I made this. I can’t believe everything that it took for this to happen: picking up the guitar for the first time, playing at my sister’s wedding and sucking. That kid is me.” Only these days, Lacy has the world watching.
• Oh Yeah? is out now on RCA
