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“Should I not buy these?” Steve Lacy asks about the pair of crystal-encrusted silk-chiffon trousers he has on. We are at the Rodeo Drive Gucci store’s third-floor “VIP salon.” It’s really more of an enclosure hemmed in by mint-green curtains, through which a barrage of sales associates appear at random, offering water, tea, Champagne — one even mentions “light bites” — while bringing Lacy leather pants, logo belts, and horse-bit loafers. Lacy’s dog, a coffee-colored American Bully named Eve, roams the floor unleashed.
For the past hour, Lacy has been in crisis over the pants, owing in part to their extravagant cost (which I’ll later Google, only to find three of the most terrifying words in the English language: Price upon request) and in part to the fact that they don’t exactly fit. “When I’m spending some money for real, I wanna be sure I’m making the right choice, man,” he says. As we wait for a tailor to pin the pants for hemming, Lacy tells me about a recent LACMA benefit where he hung out with Demna, the creative director of Gucci, whose first collection he’s trying on. (Lacy also counts among his favorite labels Kiko Kostadinov, The Row, and JW Anderson–era Dior.) There’s a sincerity to Lacy’s love of clothes that betrays his youth, a kind of kid-in-a-candy-store quality as he shakes hands and cracks jokes with the swirl of shop attendants while adding items to the growing pile. When the tailor arrives and reveals that he can’t take in the waist because the crystals are hand-stitched, Lacy resolves, somber as someone resigned to lost love, “I gotta let them go.”
Afternoons like this are a rare escape for Lacy, who for months has been in the studio every day until well after midnight, hard at work on his third studio album, Oh Yeah? It will be his first since his major-label debut, Gemini Rights, went supernova in 2022.
You’ve almost certainly heard that album’s breakout single, “Bad Habit.” It opens with whispery bedroom vocals, harking back to Lacy’s lo-fi Garage Band beginnings. “I wish I knew,” he sings, before erupting into a bombastic hook: “I wish I knew you wanted me.” By turns funky, soulful, and psychedelic, the song is a tapestry of disparate textures. You could dance to it, cry to it, fuck to it. And people did. There was a time when you couldn’t open TikTok without hearing that song, which went to No. 1 on the Billboard “Hot 100” and then stayed there for weeks, ending Harry Styles’s reign. It became the first song in history to simultaneously top the hip-hop–R&B and rock-alternative charts. It surpassed 1.5 billion streams on Spotify and 2.5 million uses on TikTok. It won him a Grammy.
Before that, Lacy had primarily made his name in the background as the wunderkind who helped produce the Internet’s Grammy-nominated album, Ego Death, then went on to collaborate with some of the biggest names in music, from Kendrick Lamar to Vampire Weekend, all before his 21st birthday. Years later, he’s still figuring out what kind of artist he wants to be. As an openly queer Black man, he’s wary of being pigeonholed by the industry or constrained by the expectations of fans who came to know him as a teen. He recognizes that this loyal audience (he now has 3.5 million followers on Instagram) is partly why his label, RCA, has let him cook with this new album. “I think having that definitely gave me leverage and is why the label trusts me the way it does,” he says. But as he prepares for the record’s release, he seems both excited and a little afraid — not that it will flop but that it may change his life in ways he can’t control.
Right now, he’s recognizable enough to enjoy the perks of making it — the VIP floor with its private entrance — while still occupying that narrow stratum of “weirdo musician” success, where he’s famous only when he needs to be. At 27, he may well be Gen Z’s first rock star, though it hasn’t yet cost him his freedom. “But who knows, bro,” he tells me. “After this album, I don’t fucking know.”
Growing up in Compton, California, Lacy thought it was normal for families to spontaneously break into song. His Filipino father wasn’t around much and died when Lacy was 10, and he was raised in a house of Black women. All of them sang, and on holidays, “the whole family was like a choir,” he remembers. “Even if we were just singing ‘Happy Birthday,’ everyone would break into harmony parts.”
Around the house, he absorbed his sisters’ eclectic tastes — Lauryn Hill, Tracy Chapman, Musiq Soulchild — and played Guitar Hero. At church, he idolized the backing band, in particular guitarist Jairus Mozee, a Grammy-nominated producer who had performed with Prince and Janet Jackson. When Lacy picked up the guitar at 10 years old, Mozee gave him lessons.
Lacy’s mother sent him to Washington Prep, a public high school “in the hood” that was known for its jazz band. “I didn’t know anybody over there,” he tells me. “But my mom was like, ‘You gonna go here, and you gonna be in the band.” Fatefully, that band already had a guitarist, so he was forced to pick up the bass (“I was like, Well, it shouldn’t be that hard ”). More fatefully still, it was there that Lacy met Jameel Bruner — younger brother of singer and bassist Stephen Bruner, better known as Thundercat — who introduced him to the world of music production through software like Reason, which he began to mess around with. By 15, Lacy was making beats for the soul band Bruner was part of called the Internet, an offshoot of the hip-hop collective Odd Future. They were hard at work on what would become Ego Death, an album that was nominated for a Grammy when Lacy was a high-school senior. “I felt like Hannah Montana,” he tells me, laughing. “No one at my school knew what the fuck the Internet was. I went to the Grammys, then went to school the next day.”
Encouraged by his bandmates, Lacy began working on a solo project, recording and mixing his first single, “Dark Red,” on a beaten-up iPhone, which was recently acquired by the Smithsonian. Despite receiving critical acclaim for his debut solo album, which he recorded in his sister’s bedroom, Lacy remained a relatively niche “if you know, you know” artist until he got picked up by a major label for his second record. “Everyone signed me for mad-low money because I was seen as a wild card at the time,” he says. “But it was great ’cause I recouped so fast and got so rich after it.”
While his intuition for a viral hook is undeniable, his IDGAF posting style also helped him grow a loyal following. In a landscape in which many celebrities refine themselves for public consumption, fans noticed that Lacy appeared to buck media training. For a while, during what he has called “breakup psychosis,” Lacy was grid-posting several times a day: memes, the same selfie several ways, a photo of poop in a toilet. While he was initially resistant to getting on TikTok, that changed after he signed up. “I was like, This shit’s fun as hell.” The surge in attention online also brought new opportunities — he considered acting, auditioning for a role on the second season of Euphoria, but ultimately doubled down on music. “I hate that there’s some agents out there floating around with my embarrassing self-tape,” he tells me.
That he became internet famous so young meant Lacy had to do much of his growing up in public; fumbles that typically would have been private were minutely analyzed by millions. In 2017, when he had just graduated from high school, he came out as bisexual in a Tumblr post, a personal milestone overshadowed by his comment that he was “not attracted to black boys.” In 2020, he came under fire again when he made a joke about Asia needing a COVID vaccine that many found unsavory (laughing, he tells me that people accused him of being self-hating “in both directions”). A few years later, a video went viral of him smashing a disposable camera that a fan threw at him onstage — though publications like TMZ initially misreported that Lacy had smashed the fan’s iPhone.
Today, Lacy says he’s grateful to these experiences for humbling him and teaching him not to always act on impulse. Throughout our conversation, he toggles between frank transparency and soft-spoken reserve; aware of how words can be misinterpreted, he now chooses them more carefully. Tired of the “gray film” that social media had cast over his whole existence, he went completely off-grid a few months ago.
As the sun sets through a balcony window overlooking Rodeo Drive, Lacy makes his final selections and hands over his AmEx, then changes back into the clothes he arrived in: a pair of leather pants and an oversize T-shirt with an image of Marilyn Monroe, only her lips in color.
Lately, he tells me, he’s given up some bad habits. On top of deleting social media, he’s been working out, eating right, and “trying not to be in the studio every night till 4 a.m.” In the past, he’d “been stoned the whole fucking time” while writing. That all changed with this album. Last September, Lacy was working on the new album in Paris, where he’s been off and on while recording, and got a bad cold. “I stopped drinking coffee and taking edibles, and I wrote an insane verse. I was like, Oh, I’m curious about this brain, so I stopped doing everything. This is the first album where I’m fully present in my body.”
This approach allowed him to achieve new things lyrically. “Before, it was always ‘I made the beat, I got the hook, y’all do the rest,’ ” he tells me. “But now I’ve been falling in love with writing. These are probably some of the best verses I ever wrote,” he says, explaining that the process allowed him to dredge a well of personal experience — his relationship to his family, his exes, himself.
The initial seed of this album was heartbreak: a relationship that ended five or six years ago and also inspired his last record. “There’s, like, three songs on this album about just wanting this person back,” he tells me, before comparing the experience of writing these songs to putting down a childhood pet. “You realize that dog is the last breathing embodiment of the time you got it. I think as I’m getting older, having to find fun and wisdom is so much different than when I was just, like, doing psychedelics on a Tuesday. That person represents such a freedom that I had when I was 20 years old.”
While other people in the industry tend to be strategic and methodical about managing their careers, Lacy is guided by instinct, his longtime collaborator Solange tells me. “Steve will be like, ‘I’m going on tour because I miss performing’ or ‘I’m putting out a single and the album’s not done because I feel connected to this song permeating the world right now.’ ” Since Lacy co-produced two songs on Solange’s 2019 album, When I Get Home (he and his sisters also provided back-up vocals), the two have remained close, speaking on the phone almost every week. “He sort of uses where he is at in life as his only marker of how he wants to show up in the world, and that is motivated by feeling,” Solange says.
Recently, Lacy chopped his signature braids to usher in a new era. Frequent changes to his appearance, he tells me, allow him to move through the world unseen. This chameleonic quality is a defining feature of Lacy’s public image. It seems to stem from his particular intersections as well as from the circumstances of his upbringing: what he describes as a house filled with “mad feminine energy.” Though his mom would sometimes remind him of what he was, a Black man who would be treated as such when out in the world, he also felt that he “didn’t grow up around people performing their gender roles; they were just whatever they wanted to be. We were all pretty gender fluid in a way.”
Perhaps because of these dualities, Lacy seems skeptical of the language of identity, at least when it’s reduced to cheap marketing pandering. (“I feel like a lot of people use the gay bug to market their shit. And I never did,” he said in a recent interview with Rolling Stone.) He refuses to play the mascot.
This reluctance to capitalize on identity may actually broaden his appeal, yet mainstream success also threatens to distance him from the audience that has been with him from the beginning. Lacy concedes there’s “always a dissonance in getting bigger.” He notices it most at concerts. In 2022, a video of one of Lacy’s performances, in which the audience didn’t seem to know the lyrics to the second verse of “Bad Habit,” circulated online. “At a certain point, you become like a commodity, and there are things about that that are annoying,” he told the New York Times of the incident. In our conversation, he makes a distinction between his core fan base and the people who come to his shows: “The concertgoers are white, but that’s just who buys the tickets,” he tells me. “In the streets, I’m still for the alt-Negroes, which I love.”
As we trail a pair of shopping-bag-toting salespeople into the elevator, I press him on the question of politics. What responsibility does he have to the communities he represents? “There’s other people that are supposed to be activists. That’s not my role,” he tells me. The doors close, and he gets a bit quieter. “I mean, I could say just being a Black dude and doing anything remotely queer is pretty radical in itself. I think there’s so much you can do by just existing.”
When we get in his car and head to his studio, the Village Studios off Santa Monica Boulevard, it’s almost dark. We enter to find Lacy’s songwriting partner Matt Castellanos and a sound engineer waiting. If they were annoyed by Lacy’s absence all afternoon, they don’t mention it. As Lacy tells me, it’s going to be another late one: After this, he has a recording session with the Internet, who are working on new music.
Panting, Lacy’s dog, Eve, makes her way around the room, sniffing shoes and licking hands before settling in a corner. Lacy stands at the control board in his new leather jacket and asks the engineer to queue a few songs from the album: first up, the dance track with that hook he wrote in Paris, which is funny and a little vulgar. I can already picture it being sung in a symphony of TikToks. Then he plays another, called “Nuthin,” which he tells me is the third of the songs he wrote about the heartbreak that has given him two albums. This one has the ache of a ballad. He closes his eyes and sings along, his voice earnest and lightly strained. I think to myself that this may be the sound of his next era, when the pyrotechnics fade and he hits you with a crooning vocal, an agonizing lyric, and you’re left alone in a room with Steve Lacy.
A few more verses, then finishing tweaks, and this album will be done. (He tells me he just finalized the sequence.) Once released, it won’t belong to him but the fans, the world.
“I feel like I accidentally got this big, you know?” he says. “I was supposed to just be the little homie helping out. I never thought I’d have a life where I have to decide what I’m here to say.”
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