Steve Lacy’s Modern Love Songs
In the summer of 2022, Steve Lacy’s “Bad Habit,” a buoyant but doleful song about a missed shot—“I bite my tongue, it’s a bad habit,” he sings ruefully—started going crazy on TikTok. Lacy, who was twenty-four at the time, was previously best known as a guitarist in the Internet, a psych-R. & B. band that emerged out of the sprawling Los Angeles hip-hop group Odd Future. “Bad Habit” was an unexpected but delightful hit. That fall, the track was nominated for three Grammys, including Song of the Year, and spent thirty-five weeks on the Hot 100, including three at No. 1. Interestingly, “Bad Habit” was also the first single ever to top five of Billboard’s genre charts (including R. & B. / Hip-Hop and Rock & Alternative), which speaks to the odd elasticity of Lacy’s sound. A song such as “Bad Habit” can perhaps exist only now, in an era in which every piece of music is available on an endless lateral plane—a time in which genre, as an organizing principle, has largely fossilized.
Earlier this month, Lacy released his third LP, “Oh Yeah?,” a gorgeous, deeply humane record. Lacy has matured as a songwriter: “Oh Yeah?” is rhythmically expansive, and its lyrics are feverish, incriminating. His style, though, is still idiosyncratic—a particular mix of bedroom melancholy and broadband corruption. The new songs effectively marry the immediacy and offline charm of early-nineties R. & B. (Babyface, TLC) with the disaffection of life lived through a screen.
I recently met Lacy in the lobby of a hotel on the edge of New York’s Chinatown. It was a steamy, fluorescent afternoon; we carried our iced coffees to Seward Park, finding an empty bench in the shade. Lacy’s best songs combine elements of psychedelia, hip-hop, and alternative R. & B. (a genre developed and perfected, in the early twenty-tens, by artists such as Frank Ocean, SZA, and the Weeknd). Some parts of “Oh Yeah?” seem to take inspiration from indie rock (Weezer, Dirty Projectors, occasionally Beck), whereas others skew more experimental (Sun Ra, Parliament-Funkadelic). Substantive verses are new terrain for Lacy, who, as a younger writer, worried more about hooks and beats. “ ‘Verses? Who cares!’ That was my vibe when I first started,” Lacy said. But, on this record, “I was kind of mopey until I got a good verse. And then I was FaceTime-ing everyone: ‘Look at this! I said this!’ ”
Lately, Lacy has been listening to a lot of Moondog, the avant-garde composer known to mid-century New Yorkers as the Viking of Sixth Avenue. (Beginning in the nineteen-forties, Moondog, who was born Louis Hardin, could be found on the streets of Manhattan sporting a horned helmet and a voluminous gray beard, playing an array of bespoke instruments.) “Moondog is not playing chords,” Lacy said. “Where I come from, it’s super chords—the flat-9, the flat-5.” Before “Bad Habit” took off—and before Lacy turned twenty-one—he was already finding considerable success as a producer, having worked with Kendrick Lamar, Solange, Mac Miller, and Vampire Weekend. Lacy made the beat for “PRIDE.,” a dreamy, spectral cut from “DAMN.”—Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, triple-platinum album from 2017—using his cracked iPhone 6, an iRig adapter, and the GarageBand app. “I’m, like, ‘Am I gonna be the artist, or am I gonna be the artist that inspires other artists?’ Everybody took it,” he said of his style. “I gave it away, actually. Chorus, guitar, R. & B. drums.” Now he’s been trying to “flip my process on its head.” Lacy pointed to “The Feeling,” a soulful, wavy new song about submitting to passion. “Chords don’t happen until the acoustic guitar on the chorus. Then it fades in, and you’re, like, Whoa, where’d the fuck that come from? Those little nerdy things excite me.”
In conversation, Lacy is charismatic, funny, and frank. He has 3.6 million followers on Instagram, where he posts often, and in a manner that calls back to an earlier, less mercenary version of the app: selfies, memes, pictures of his feet in socks and slides. Lyrically, “Oh Yeah?” is surprisingly raw and openhearted. It’s especially vulnerable when it comes to depictions of sex and yearning. After a brief moment of consideration—“I don’t want to cook myself,” he said, laughing—Lacy described himself as “single-ish.” He sings frequently about the utter impossibility of modern romance. “I think I’m in love with you / I think you should be in love with me / Bad boy, what you gonna do? / ’Cause everybody got someone but me,” Lacy pines on the chorus of “Show You Me,” a new song built around a folky guitar riff and a bleating synthesizer. Lacy is queer, and he dates people of various gender identities. During a verse on “Show You Me,” he admits, “Been a while since I had some coochie stuck in my teeth.”
Lacy described “Oh Yeah?” as an exploration of the various ways in which he might be “underdeveloped as a human,” mostly because he has been so focussed on becoming a musician. (In 2016, when the Internet’s third record, “Ego Death,” was nominated for a Grammy, Lacy had to get up the morning after the ceremony and go to high school.) Much like “Gemini Rights,” Lacy’s previous album, “Oh Yeah?” is tangentially concerned with the fallout of one specific romantic relationship—“a heartbreak that happened to me six years ago,” Lacy said—and the grab bag of obsessive things that we do in the aftermath of loss. Lacy pointed to “Nice Shoes / In Your World,” a pounding, frenetic song about trying to outrun your own desire. “My dick is getting hard again / At the thought of you and me holding hands,” he sings. Lacy’s voice is nasal and occasionally a little wonky, which gives it unusual warmth. He wants his work to feel like a benevolent companion. “I look for this underlying feeling of a hand on my thigh, like—isn’t being human fucking weird for all of us?” Lacy said.
Mostly “Oh Yeah?” is about the sensation of coming to—of having weathered the tumult of love and maybe learned a couple of things. “This album sounds like post-nut clarity,” Lacy joked. Sometimes, in those tender, postcoital minutes, we are exceptionally awake to our shortcomings and fears. “You know when you’ve been on a wild bender or whatever? You’ve had the moment, everyone is gone, and then . . . those thoughts,” he said. “That’s what my album is like.”
Lacy grew up in Compton—he has the city’s name tattooed on the right side of his chest—with his mother and three sisters. He described his childhood as happy, although, he said, “I didn’t know what rich was. I thought rich was anyone who had two bathrooms in their house, and stairs.” He continued, “We had fun. I guess there was gang stuff. But you know what? There’s gangs that be happenin’ in all neighborhoods.” On the first verse of “Is It Cool?,” which features a velvety, searching outro from SZA, he sings about the early death of his father:
“There’s this whole thing of cheaters being fuckboys, but that’s actually a deep, deep, deep insecurity of the soul,” he said. I wondered if that verse was somehow in conversation with a line from “Nice Shoes”—“Crazy how you can be sad and not notice”—though I told Lacy I understood if he didn’t want to talk about his father’s death, or how grief has shaped him. “It’s a beautiful thing to talk about, actually,” he said. “It’s also a weird thing, because there is no sadness to be felt. My father was pretty occasional. I’d see him on holidays and stuff. But I never saw my parents be romantic or anything.” Lacy’s father was an immigrant from the Philippines who worked as a carpenter. “He wanted his green card, so they made it happen. My big sister remembers coming home, and they were just married. You don’t really expect two people like that to be together. I can show you.” Lacy pulled up an old photograph of his parents standing together. His mother is young and beaming. His father looks significantly older, his expression staid. “Isn’t that insane? They are a pairing, but I’m, like—this is so funny, that this made me,” Lacy said. “I grew up a Black American. Filipino? Forget about it. But it’s in me.”
He’s planning to play a show in the Philippines on his next tour, and he’s been attempting to gather more information about his paternal lineage. “When you’re that young, you don’t know what death means,” he said. “I’m learning that there is a hole. It does go back to that line—it’s crazy that you can be sad and not notice! There’s a lot that I just kind of bypass, because I didn’t know how to process those emotions as a kid.”
Later that day, over dinner—“I’m on my Lenny Kravitz shit,” Lacy said, forgoing pasta for salad—I asked how he was managing the vagaries of fame. “I want to give it a fair shot,” he said of his career. “But I’m not necessarily trying to do anything that will damage my humanity.” I told him that I admired how unmediated “Oh Yeah?” feels—in a cultural moment defined by curation, filters, artificial intelligence, optimization, and perpetual performance, his songs are goofy, profound, and unguarded. “It’s actually very scary,” he said. “I was building this relationship with the work, and I thought, It’s just us, our intimate thing. Now it’s, like, Oh, shit, right—I have to share this.” He’d spent the previous few days attempting to sort out elements of the album’s visual presentation. “Beats me, you know?” he said. “I’m such a musician. I make these things to play them.”
Still, Lacy, who is prone to philosophizing (at one point, he jokingly wondered if he might be a wizard), was clinging to some sense that the universe will do right by him—that, ultimately, it does right by all of us. “I do believe in that higher power—that everything is already written, and these are lessons for me, even if they kind of suck right now.” He laughed. “I hate a bright-side motherfucker, too. But I do believe in that.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated Lacy’s status in the Internet.