‘I was taking acid on Wednesday. I don’t have time for that now’: Alternative pop star Steve Lacy talks about his struggle to follow up huge hit Bad Habit | Pop and rock

SSince Steve Lacy became a Grammy Award-winning artist with huge success in the United States, not much 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 house in Los Angeles, but he hasn’t made any new famous friends. He is not chased in public, as he is a normal person at home. Moreover, it’s not really like that Which Famous right?

“I think my name is bigger than my face, which is great,” he says, smiling slyly. Sitting in a private room in a London hotel, wearing a Serge Gainsbourg T-shirt and jeans so ripped they might as well be shorts, Lacey says he believes he has pulled off the biggest trick of modern pop stardom: being one of the most popular musicians of his generation while being almost unrecognizable.

There is some truth to this. Thanks to the collage on the cover of his 2022 album, Gemini Rights, many listeners responsible for 2.8 billion listens on Spotify probably have no clear idea of ​​what he looks like. But the fan who saw him on his way to our interview did. “Oh, I posted!” Lacey leans over to show me his Instagram profile picture, with a caption calling him the GOAT (the greatest of all time). He smiles.

Perhaps the real reason the 28-year-old’s life seems so normal to him now is because it hasn’t been normal since he was a teenager: he was a well-respected music geek long before he hit the mainstream. After teaching himself to play guitar as a child, he received his first Grammy Award nomination at 17, as part of the internet alt-R&B band alongside Syd, and went to school the day after the ceremony. A year later, he produced Kendrick Lamar’s song Pride, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning album Damn, using an iPhone. In 2022, the same broken phone was put on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Nile Rodgers once described him as “the embodiment of innovation.” Other words that have followed Lacey over the past decade include “miracle,” “miracle,” and “genius.”

“Well, you know what? This bullshit has been debunked,” Lacey says. Again, he looks amused, maybe a little relieved. He says the genius myth was punctured by YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano, who rated his debut solo album, 2019’s Apollo XXI, a three out of 10. “It pissed me off, but I needed it,” he says. Lacey speaks softly and often folds one tattooed arm to hold the other, but his face is always lively—especially when he has a point to prove.

“I was definitely gaslighted as a teenager, as if I thought I was perfect.” Until then, Lacey had been working on his solo music on his own. His first taste of negative criticism opened him up to the ideal of collaboration, inviting other musicians into the process, such as singer Fushi and his Internet bandmate Matt Martians. “By the time I started working on Gemini rights, I was bored with myself – I knew my options too well.” Then he “fell in love with the group aspect of songwriting. We’re supposed to do this together, you know?”

He was absorbing the work of other artists as well. Lacey is in London to promote his highly anticipated third album Oh Yeah?, but so far, he’s spent most of his time shopping for books, searching for a novel to replace his latest read, All Fours by Miranda July. He’s picked up more books by female and gay authors, including Love in Exile by Shon Faye, Palaver by Bryan Washington and Michelle T.’s anthology Sluts. Lacey has always enjoyed reading, but this new ferocious appetite coincides with a more deliberate approach to lyricism. “I think I’m getting more intense in all parts,” he says. “I just wanted the beat to work and the chorus to be nice,” he says on previous recordings. Now he refuses to “just say anything” for the sake of the hook. That’s partly why oh yeah? It took a long time.

Lacey didn’t intend to spend four years making it. He certainly didn’t take a break. “I’m not a vacation guy,” he smiles wryly. “Making music brings me so much joy, that’s part of it. Then people who post vacations make me never want to go on vacation. Like, what else do you do? Vacation isn’t personal, bro.”

Instead, Lacy makes his songs — or at least thinks about them — every day, producing them more out of compulsion than discipline. When the hype over Gemini Rights died down, after he won Best Progressive R&B Album at the 2023 Grammy Awards, he set a deadline for his next album, April 20, 2024 (AKA 4/20, the annual celebration day for weed smokers in the US). Maybe he could have released something. “I had a bunch of songs that I thought were great,” he says. “But there were still things I needed to learn about myself and about music. So I kept moving forward.”

A year later, his record company tried to move the process forward. Lacy’s beat-filled single Beautiful Shoes came out, along with a Rolling Stone cover story that teased more new music. “I think the record company thought they would encourage me to finish my album,” he smiled ruefully. “But that’s not how it works.” So, he continued to listen to a “ridiculous” amount of songs, and obsessively edited out anything that “bothered” me. Finally, enough was enough. “I was like, ‘I’m going to work on this forever. I have to make some decisions.’

It’s no surprise, then, that Lacey describes Oh Yeah? as his “most conceived” and “most complete” album to date. He says he’s not trying to replicate the success of Bad Habit, but he wants to match its energy — a casual, unpolished pop song that falls somewhere between psychedelic indie and funky R&B. Its influence can be heard everywhere: overtly in the music of artists such as American singer-songwriter Malcolm Todd, often called “white Steve Lacy”; More precisely in the audience’s growing appetite for annoying guitar sounds and unconventional song structures. For Lacey, the greatest lesson he learned from Bad Habit’s popularity was that his eccentricities did not make him a “niche” artist. “Gemini rights showed me how far things can go,” he says. “I didn’t care about getting to first place until I got to second place.” Now he writes songs with the headlines in mind. “Without being too corny about it,” he explains. “He still has all my quirks and stuff.”

There’s a trip-hop track featuring Erykah Badu (“We talk about the ‘gram all the time,” he says) and an unrequited love song featuring Cecile Believe, who Lacey becomes obsessed with after discovering she was the singer on Sophie’s album Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides (“She’s kind of like a human synthesizer”). Despite all the remastering, the music hasn’t lost its Gemini rights charm, somehow sounding technically sophisticated and beautifully home-made at the same time. However, the lyrics were noticeably less guarded – even the ones he struggled with. For example, the opening four lines of “Is this cool?” months to arrive. Then, one day, he suddenly unleashed some of the most revealing lyrics he’d ever sung: “I never needed a man / Tatay died when I was 10 / Turns out I’m fine / I just cheat every now and then.”

Lacey was born in Compton, California, to an African-American mother and a Filipino father who was largely absent before his death. “Tatay” means father in Tagalog. “I never said anything about being Filipino, or anything about my father dying,” he says. He still looked shocked at the lines coming out of his mouth. “It wasn’t premeditated or anything.” He was in the studio with Foushée and the Martians at the time. “They looked at me like, ‘Bruh, are you good? Do you need a hug? “I was like: ‘Nah, I’m intense!’ Let’s go!

Lacey has a habit of doing just that: tripping over painful emotional truths—such as linking infidelity to childhood trauma—under the guise of deadpan humor. “There’s a lot of comedy on the album, but I’m covering some deep stuff,” he says. Other deceptively silly phrases include “I’m a big baby sucking big tits” and “Everybody’s having sex, but nobody cares” on the lazy rock track Doom. The “creepy things” he confesses to in Oh Yeah? It is a result of his emotional growth over the past few years. “I think I’m overdeveloped as a creative person — not like saying I’m the greatest artist, but compared to how I’ve evolved in a human sense, when it comes to working through struggles or depression or anxiety,” he says.

He says he sometimes tricks himself into thinking everything is fine when he slips into anxiety. “My anarchy is kind of silent,” he says. “I could be out of work for three to five years and not even know it’s happening.”

Many of Lacy’s breakdowns occurred in response to the ending of love affairs. “Gemini Rights” was ostensibly a separate album, but that relationship turned out to be only a rebound from the one he’s still writing about six years after it ended. “Oh yeah? It’s about this person – well, not this person, damn that person! This album Inspired “Through this disconnect,” he says. It’s been a long, on-off relationship, but Lacey, who is known as an eccentric, is more interested in grieving the sense of possibility he felt when they were first together.[The feeling of] “Dealing with someone before you get really hurt was inspiring in so many ways,” he says. “Trauma is unforgettable.” He pauses, then bursts into laughter. “I spent a lot of time running away from it, but it’ll keep showing up until you sit down with this shit.”

It’s also hard to fall in love as a teenager when you have a big job to do. “When I was 19, I used to do acid on Wednesdays. I didn’t have time for that crap anymore. Being with this person was a certain freedom. Now everything is more organized. I’m a boss and everyone looks to me to answer things and implement big ideas.”

Maybe success changed his life after all. For a while, Lacey longed to be a power couple. “I thought I needed to like this person. But this is stupid,” he says. Writing oh yeah? Help him understand that emotional safety in a relationship is more important. “I realized how big my ego is when it comes to love.” He laughs at himself. “When it comes to who I’m going to commit to, I’m extremely OCD about how they should look and how I want love to look, so I had to get over myself there.” Lacey begins to explain how something – or someone – helped him reach this conclusion. Then, pulling himself together, he playfully grabbed the phone recording our conversation and pretended to pause. “I don’t want to talk about this on the record…”

Another topic that was supposed to be off-limits was the fact that he smashed a fan’s camera after having things thrown at him on stage during his last tour in 2022. It became a surprisingly big story. Shortly after, he explained on Instagram that the outburst was the result of his frustration with the unruly fans. “Maybe I could have reacted better? Sure,” he wrote. “But I’m a real person with real feelings.” His publicist asked me to avoid mentioning it, but Lacey brought it up anyway — if only to illustrate how news stories can distort the truth.

At the time, there were widespread false reports that he had smashed the fan’s phone. He realizes that certain lines of Oh yeah? It may be similarly misinterpreted. “There could definitely be the potential for something major to happen, where something is taken out of context,” he says. “[When the camera story went viral] And then I thought: Oh my God, I must be famous. So it is He is famous? “I have my famous moments, but I don’t feel like a famous person.”

When he grew up, all he wanted to do was play the guitar. “I think about that all the time,” he says. “I cried in the car that day listening to the album. I was like, wow, I can’t believe I made this. I can’t believe everything it took for this to happen: picking up the guitar for the first time, playing at my sister’s wedding, and sucking it up. This baby is me.” Only these days, Lacey is being watched by the world.