Steve Lacy had a breakout year in 2022 thanks to the success of his second album Gemini Rights and the single “Bad Habits.” Lacy, 24, hopes to make 2023 an even bigger year by continuing to make and release more new music. The R&B star won Best Progressive R&B Album before the 65th Annual Grammy Awards began Sunday night, and he was nominated for three other awards.
“All naturale… Happy 2023,” Lacy wrote on Instagram on Jan. 7. “I wanna produce more feature more make more music music music [and] have even more fun doing it. cheers n wish u a very well stream Gemini Rights.”
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Lacy gained attention for his work as the guitarist with the band The Internet. After releasing his first solo EP in 2017, he gained more fans through his work on Frank Ocean’s “911/Mr. Lonely” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Pride.” In 2019, he released his first solo studio album, Apollo XXI, which was nominated for the Best Urban Contemporary Album Grammy.
In 2022, Lacy scored his mainstream breakthrough with “Bad Habit,” which quickly became a viral smash on TikTok. The music video for the track has over 65 million views on YouTube. The song was nominated for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Solo Performance at the Grammys. Gemini Rights won Best Progressive R&B Album and also includes the singles “Mercury,” “Sunshine,” and “Helmet.” Producer Dahi’s work with Lacy was cited as part of his Producer of the Year, Non-Classical nomination.
“Bad Habits” was one of the first songs Lacy wrote with singer-songwriter Foushee, Lacy told The Guardian. Songwriter Diana Gordon heard it, and came up with the line starting with “You can’t surprise a Gemini…” The song “took probably a year. I didn’t finish it until a week before I turned in the album,” he said.
“It was writing to that feeling of being a shy person,” Lacy further explained about the writing of the song. “It’s kind of a play on confidence – by the end, it flips and it’s, like: ‘Oh, you coming back to me now.’ I’m kind of flexing, giving it back and being, like: ‘You were too good for me,’ and then in the end, I’m almost too good for [them] but I’m still down. To me, that was just a really fun story that I’m sure everybody has experienced before.”
Lacy’s next release could be extra tracks from the Gemini Rights sessions. In an interview with the Grammys website, Lacy said there was a lot of extra stuff that did not make the final cut. “I make a lot of stuff, so I learned with this album two things: the superpower of editing and that you got to make trash,” Lacy said. “Doing that freed me. When I used to think that I would dream up something perfect, I realized that I just had to let it come [to me.] Just blurt words out and vomit them out, let it go, and edit, edit, edit. I would treat [Gemini Rights] like how a rapper would and that made it way more fun.”
That said, he was proud of the final Gemini Rights album. The process left him confident in where he is today. “I love the craft of music and developing sounds using the knowledge that I have of music, where meshing so many things together just creates unique experiences for myself and others is exciting to me,” he told Grammy.com.
