Steve Lacy releases new album "Oh Yeah?" after his "Bad Habit" breakout

Steve Lacy released his new album, "Oh Yeah?," a 10-track record that follows up 2022's "Bad Habit," the lo-fi pop song that topped the Hot 100 and earned Grammy nominations for record and song of the year. The Compton-raised singer, now 28, told the Los Angeles Times that the level of fame the hit brought him still catches him off guard. "That's funny to think about," he said of being recognized constantly around Los Angeles. "It can be annoying, but it's been very calm right now."

That fame arrived fast and, at times, badly. Touring his prior album "Gemini Rights" in 2022, Lacy smashed a camera onstage in New Orleans after a fan threw it at him mid-show, a flashpoint he now attributes to a younger, rowdier crowd "Bad Habit" brought to his shows. "Before that, it was just music nerds at the show, or a cool intellectual thing," he said, adding that he had to adjust to fans without much concert etiquette even as he came to enjoy their energy.

"Oh Yeah?" leans into that tension between stardom and intimacy across its 10 songs, drawing on the Brazilian jazz chords of João Gilberto and the psychedelic soul of Erykah Badu, who appears directly on the song "Pure Colour." Lacy said that track processes grief. "I've grown up with lots of death. Cousins, my father, aunts, my grandmother," he said, describing the song's mood as a kind of submission to that loss. SZA also guests on "Is It Cool?," trading verses with Lacy on a song built around an unrepentant cheater's point of view.

Lacy recorded part of the album in Paris, where he has also modeled for YSL, though he remains based in Los Angeles; he marked the record's release with a listening party at artist Lauren Halsey's "Sister Dreamer" sculpture garden near SoFi Stadium and Kia Forum. He also said he has been making music again with the Internet, the group he shares with childhood friends Syd and Matt Martians, as covered in Steve Lacy and Syd release solo albums on the same day. "It's a family. We all just love hanging out together," he said of the band.

Lacy, who won a Grammy at the 65th Grammy Awards in 2023, said he has made peace with whatever commercial fate awaits "Oh Yeah?" compared to "Bad Habit's" runaway success. "The older you get, all your accomplishments are the same size," he said, pointing to milestones like his Grammy nomination as a teenager and his phone landing in the Smithsonian as equally significant to him now, regardless of scale. "I can't make my success a personality."