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In the summer of 2022, Steve Lacy\u2019s \u201cBad Habit,\u201d a buoyant but doleful song about a missed shot\u2014\u201cI bite my tongue, it\u2019s a bad habit,\u201d he sings ruefully\u2014started 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. \u201cBad Habit\u201d 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, \u201cBad Habit\u201d was also the first single ever to top five of Billboard\u2019s<\/em> genre charts (including R.\u00a0&\u00a0B. \/ Hip-Hop and Rock & Alternative), which speaks to the odd elasticity of Lacy\u2019s sound. A song such as \u201cBad Habit\u201d can perhaps exist only now, in an era in which every piece of music is available on an endless lateral plane\u2014a time in which genre, as an organizing principle, has largely fossilized.<\/p>\n Earlier this month, Lacy released his third LP, \u201cOh Yeah?,\u201d a gorgeous, deeply humane record. Lacy has matured as a songwriter: \u201cOh Yeah?\u201d is rhythmically expansive, and its lyrics are feverish, incriminating. His style, though, is still idiosyncratic\u2014a particular mix of bedroom melancholy and broadband corruption. The new songs effectively marry the immediacy and offline charm of early-nineties R.\u00a0&\u00a0B. (Babyface, TLC) with the disaffection of life lived through a screen.<\/p>\n I recently met Lacy in the lobby of a hotel on the edge of New York\u2019s Chinatown. It was a steamy, fluorescent afternoon; we carried our iced coffees to Seward Park, finding an empty bench in the shade. Lacy\u2019s 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 \u201cOh Yeah?\u201d 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. \u201c\u00a0\u2018Verses? Who cares!\u2019 That was my vibe when I first started,\u201d Lacy said. But, on this record, \u201cI was kind of mopey until I got a good verse. And then I was FaceTime-ing everyone: \u2018Look at this! I said this!\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n 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.) \u201cMoondog is not playing chords,\u201d Lacy said. \u201cWhere I come from, it\u2019s super chords\u2014the flat-9, the flat-5.\u201d Before \u201cBad Habit\u201d took off\u2014and before Lacy turned twenty-one\u2014he was already finding considerable success as a producer, having worked with Kendrick Lamar, Solange, Mac Miller, and Vampire Weekend. Lacy made the beat for \u201cPRIDE<\/em>.,\u201d a dreamy, spectral cut from \u201cDAMN.<\/em>\u201d\u2014Lamar\u2019s Pulitzer Prize-winning, triple-platinum album from 2017\u2014using his cracked iPhone 6, an iRig adapter, and the GarageBand app. \u201cI\u2019m, like, \u2018Am I gonna be the artist, or am I gonna be the artist that inspires other artists?\u2019 Everybody took it,\u201d he said of his style. \u201cI gave it away, actually. Chorus, guitar, R.\u00a0&\u00a0B. drums.\u201d Now he\u2019s been trying to \u201cflip my process on its head.\u201d Lacy pointed to \u201cThe Feeling,\u201d a soulful, wavy new song about submitting to passion. \u201cChords don\u2019t happen until the acoustic guitar on the chorus. Then it fades in, and you\u2019re, like, Whoa, where\u2019d the fuck that come from? Those little nerdy things excite\u00a0me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the summer of 2022, Steve Lacy\u2019s \u201cBad Habit,\u201d a buoyant but doleful song about a missed shot\u2014\u201cI bite my tongue, it\u2019s a bad habit,\u201d he sings ruefully\u2014started 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2513459,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[22008,23083,362131],"class_list":["post-2513458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-magazine","tag-pop-music","tag-splitscreenimagerightinset"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Steve-Lacys-Modern-Love-Songs.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2513458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2513458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2513458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2513460,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2513458\/revisions\/2513460"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2513459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2513458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2513458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2513458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}