How Lucius Came Home
Q&A: Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig talk with Paste about re-recording their 2014 masterpiece Wildewoman, finding each other again after making Second Nature, working with Adam Granduciel and Madison Cunningham, and their eponymous new album.
Maybe you’ve heard Lucius harmonizing the titular chorus in Harry Styles’ “Treat People With Kindness,” or tweaking their singing into celestial patches in the War on Drugs’ “I Don’t Live Here Anymore.” Or, perhaps, you saw them in Roger Waters’ band on his Us + Them Tour in the late 2010s, where they both took the lead on Clare Torry’s wordless “The Great Gig in the Sky.” I promise you, Lucius is a part of you somehow. They’ve sung with the likes of My Morning Jacket, Jackson Browne, the Killers, Sheryl Crow, and Mavis Staples. They performed a Tiny Desk Concert before the series got really massive. Their pastoral-rock furrows in cavalier, capable, and countrified tempos, tones, and ‘tudes.
And last year, Jess Wolfe (who was deep into her pregnancy at the time) and Holly Laessig joined Joni Mitchell’s backing band for her Hollywood Bowl shows. I tell them I was at the second night’s show. “It was really quite transcendent,” Wolfe says. The duo were a part of the original ensemble that accompanied Mitchell during her Grammy-winning comeback performance at Newport Folk Festival in 2022. They, along with Brandi Carlile, the Hanseroth twins, Blake Mills, Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith, Marcus Mumford, Allison Russell, and Matt Chamberlain, started the whole thing, decamping to Mitchell’s house in California and performing the “rehabilitating jam sessions” that became the “Joni Jam” performance at the Bowl in October 2024.
But Lucius, the titanic pop group found in the smartest corners of the indie and mainstream world, have never sounded like this before. Three years ago, on Second Nature, they dawdled in sun-dappled ‘80s pop and filtered lockdown fears and restlessness into big dance bops. Then, they returned to the studio to redo their breakthrough, sort-of-debut album Wildewoman, which led them to a record titled after themselves. With their longtime bandmates Dan Molad and Peter Lalish—Wolfe and Laessig are back at their finest now, evoking roads they’ve crossed and named often since forming in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn in 2007: girl-group revivalism, cosmic pop, and a kind of bicoastal harmonizing that once echoed through western canyons.
Wolfe and Laessig are vocal foils for other singers but plug so perfectly into one another. “Gold Rush” fantasizes through a groove replete with funk beats and dauntless, sensual caroling; “Strange Love” is a piano ballad warped into a cowboy croon, the duo’s voices wrapped around walloping synths and bright, fretty guitar; “Impressions” is a collision of schools both old and new, with a pop-country charm and effervescent nod of electronica—the plinking synth-and-bass melody behind Lucius’ vocalists sounds big enough to fill a stadium. They’ve called Lucius their “coming home” record. And in the versatility of these new songs, be it the psychedelic glissando of “Stranger Danger” or the muscular guitars measuring the melody heroics of “Old Tape,” and the presence of contributors like Rob Moose, Luke Temple, Madison Cunningham, and the War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, it’s clear that their homecoming is a party you’ll want to RSVP to.
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