Lucius, 'Lucius' Album Review

On Lucius, the Indie-Pop Band Sounds Like Itself Again

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When Lucius emerged more than 15 years ago from the wilds of Ditmas Park in the outer reaches of Brooklyn, they didn’t sound much like anybody else. They still don’t, but a lot has changed in the meantime. Then a quintet, Lucius were a self-contained unit—not a gang, exactly, though their music felt like an initiation rite. The group took an unconventional approach to their instrumentation: in the early days, there was often no drum kit onstage, for example, just individual pieces distributed among the musicians, who stood in a semi-circle flanking frontwomen Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig as they sang while facing each other across banks of keyboards. The result was a robust, idiosyncratic feel to songs that landed somewhere between the candy-colored pop of old-school girl groups and muscular rock and roll, all built around the powerhouse unison vocals of Wolfe and Laessig. They sing together like each possesses one half of a whole voice, and they dress like it too, in matching outfits that complement the identical suits worn by their male bandmates.

As time went by, Lucius broadened the insular world they had created together, inviting in new collaborators—from the War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel to Brandi Carlile to Roger Waters—and investigating other sounds. They showed a more stripped-down side in 2018 on Nudes, a compilation of acoustic numbers, and set up in the middle of the dance floor for the disco-laced Second Nature in 2022. Yet as good as those albums could be, it was as if Lucius had let escape a little of the magic that made their 2012 self-titled EP and 2013 album Wildewoman stand out from everything around them. A foursome for nearly a decade now, Lucius return to that self-contained sensibility on their eponymous latest, a collection of 11 new songs that recaptures the tightly focused, intensely collaborative energy of four people who are locked into each other’s creative capabilities.

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Those capabilities have only grown over the past decade and a half. The songs on Lucius are open and spacious, with the same kinetic energy as on the early stuff. That manifests on “Gold Rush” in swiggles of guitar from Peter Lalish and a springy bassline from touring member Solomon Dorsey, underpinned with clattering percussion from Dan Molad (who also produced the album) and just a hint of a gritty vocal effect on Wolfe and Laessig’s voices. The pair serves up a reminder of their range on “Mad Love,” building from a reassuring murmur at the start to ringing harmonies on the chorus, backed by fingerpicked acoustic guitar, distant twinkling piano, and low-key swells of electronic noise.

Their voices have always been the central feature. Friends since they met at the Berklee College of Music in 2005, Wolfe and Laessig make a persuasive case for the existence of soulmates, because it seems clear they were meant to sing together. They have a commanding rapport, and they’ve never lacked for opportunities to demonstrate their vocal power—from “Dance Around It” in 2022 to their cover of “When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky” from 2014, which made Bob Dylan’s little-loved ’80s material seem revelatory. On Lucius, their prowess comes as much from their versatility as their ability to blow off the roof. On “Hallways,” Wolfe and Laessig sing with wringing emotion without ever going flat-out, and their restraint lends extra weight to a song about searching for that perfect someone when they’ve been right there all along. They stay reined in on “Borderline,” too, even as the song swells around them, letting the guitars and chiming keyboards do the work.

There are guests on Lucius, including Granduciel and California folk-pop singer Madison Cunningham. Granduciel’s hazy, warm guitar sound is unmistakable on “Old Tape,” and though his presence adds a different dimension to the song, his is definitely a supporting role and Wolfe and Laessig use his fluid guitar lines as a springboard for vocals that spiral skyward. Cunningham blends in so well on “Impressions,” which she co-wrote with Wolfe, Laessig, and Ethan Gruska, that it’s sometimes hard to tell whether there are two voices or three ringing out over a tuneful blend of guitars and keyboards. There’s a minimalist vibe to the musical arrangement, which revolves around snare drum, bass and glimmers of chiming guitar that tick like the inner workings of a clock.

Wolfe and Laessig have, over the years, become in-demand collaborators who have recorded with Waters, Jeff Tweedy, John Legend, Sheryl Crow, Harry Styles, Dawes, and the War on Drugs, among many others. They’ve learned to adapt themselves to other musicians so well that sometimes their own musical identity has been obscured: Second Nature was a huge, glittery catharsis of an album that came just as the pandemic was starting to recede, but there’s considerable distance between those pulsing disco beats and the singular indie-pop sound that launched the band on Wildewoman. That’s part of the reason their fifth full-length album is self-titled: After years of exploring, Lucius sound exactly like themselves.

Read: “How Lucius Came Home”

Eric R. Danton has been contributing to Paste since 2013. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and Pitchfork, among other publications. He writes Freak Scene, a newsletter about music in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut.

On Lucius, the Indie-Pop Band Sounds Like Itself Again

Anchored by Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, the music on the band’s latest effort recaptures the tightly focused, intensely collaborative energy of four people who are locked into each other’s creative capabilities.