If you were a fan of The Internet’s Ego Death album upon its 2015 release, and were told that someone from the alt-funk collective would have a solo Hot 100 No. 1 hit seven years later, you’d think some extraordinary shift must have happened with one of the members — they went mega-pop, they became Drake’s go-to sidekick, they got offered an Avengers theme, something. But the shift that made it possible came with the music industry, not the band. Say what you will about the oft-unwelcome chaos that TikTok has wrought on artists and labels, but the plus side of such a democratic platform becoming the industry’s biggest consumption driver is that the best song in the world can now become the biggest song in the world without any tastemakers needing to press a button to make it so. Such was the case this year with Internet guitarist Steve Lacy’s solo smash “Bad Habit” — the perfect pop song for 2022, and more crucially, just a perfect pop song in general.

Kicking in partway through its opening chorus, “Bad Habit” has a casualness to its liquid grooves and ping-ponging vocals that almost makes it feel tossed off, spontaneous. But the craft on display here is actually impossibly high-level. There’s little things, like the heart-racing guitar slide after Lacy’s first “I bite my tongue, it’s a bad habit” lament, and the way that blushing admission evolves to a sly “Can I bite your tongue, like my bad habit?” request in the next verse. And then there’s big things, like the way the simple and frustratingly universal “I wish I knew you wanted me” refrain both anchors the song and bursts your heart, and how it dissolves into a gorgeous sea of Lacy a cappella after the climactic chorus. The TikTok era would dictate the song end there, except that Lacy’s of this time but not tethered to it, so there’s still an entire second half to come — stretching the song to an unthinkable 4:03 — with less-immediate hooks, but highs (“Let’s f—–k in the baaack of the maaaaallllll….,” the inappropriate shout-along lyric of the year) that slowly reveal themselves to be just as intoxicating.

It could be frustrating to be a pop fan in 2022, when the biggest stories seemed to be about recent hits staying around forever, or about old songs getting resurrected, or about established megastars cashing in on the successes they’d long been ticketed for. We desperately needed some new blood — new, as in, actually from 2022. Even as someone who’d already been growing to underground stardom for years, Steve Lacy instantly became the freshest voice in the pop mainstream once he crossed over, and a rare feel-good breakthrough success story in a year that didn’t produce a lot of them. But none of that is as important as just how damn good “Bad Habit” sounded every single time you heard it this year — whether on TikTok, Top 40 radio or anywhere in between — and how it never ran out of new thrills, big and small, to get you swooning like the first time. Everything else is just biscuits, just gravy. — A.U.