A multi-hyphenate musician and producer who revealed his prodigious talents as a teenager, Steve Lacy got his feet wet as the guitarist in the Odd Future spin-off band the Internet before branching out into A-list production work and earning a Grammy nomination for his debut solo LP. Born in Compton, California, on May 23, 1998, Steve Lacy picked up the guitar as part of his time at church and was brought into the fold of R&B group the Internet in time for the band’s third album, 2015’s Ego Death, recorded while he was still in high school. He made his presence known immediately, co-producing more than half the album and playing guitar and bass throughout. Ego Death was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Urban Contemporary Album category, and Steve Lacy’s star was officially on the rise. His instrumental acumen and production ear led to him being an in-demand collaborator in the back half of the 2010s for chart-topping artists like Solange, Vampire Weekend, Mac Miller, Blood Orange, J. Cole, and Tyler, the Creator. His biggest credit during this time was as co-producer of the song “Pride”, from Kendrick Lamar’s 2018 Grammy and Pulitzer-winning album DAMN. A new album from the Internet also arrived in 2018, Hive Mind, which found him co-writing most of the album’s tracks, sharing lead vocals, and adding drums and keyboards to his list of credits. In addition to the Internet and his studio work, Steve Lacy also began releasing his own music, first as a series of digital singles that racked up tens of millions of streams, followed up by his debut full-length, Apollo XXI (2019). A refined mix of soul, R&B, and hip-hop, the album was nominated in the Best Urban Contemporary Grammy category in 2020. Preceded by the singles "Mercury," "Bad Habit," and "Sunshine," his sophomore effort Gemini Rights (2022) garnered critical praise and debuted at number 7 on the Billboard 200 chart. In 2023, Steve Lacy performed the song during the Grammy ceremony and won his first award, with Gemini Rights named Best Progressive R&B Album. He returned with the self-written and self-produced single “Nice Shoes” in August 2025, his first new solo release in three years. In 2026, “the feeling” and the SZA duet “is it cool?” introduced his third album, Oh yeah?. The ten-track record, which also featured Erykah Badu and Cecile Believe, was released through RCA on July 17, 2026.
