It would be easy to make a case that Lucius are indie rock’s ultimate collaborators. Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, the powerhouse vocalists who unite as one voice in Lucius, have spent the past two decades blending pop and Americana while singing alongside a cross-genre mix of luminaries—Roger Waters, Brandi Carlile, Harry Styles, Mumford & Sons, Sheryl Crow, Jeff Tweedy, John Legend, Mavis Staples, John Prine, Goose and Joni Mitchell are just some of the big name acts the duo have enhanced either on stage or in the studio.

However, while guest appearances have long been a part of the group’s own albums as well, Lucius, the fifth record from the full outfit—which also includes drummer Dan Molad and guitarist Peter Lalish—is simultaneously the most true to the core of Lucius and one of their most naturally collaborative, boasting appearances from The War On Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith and singer songwriter Madison Cunningham.   

“I don’t think there are two people who understand the ins and outs of collaboration like Jess and Holly do,” says Cunningham, who co-wrote and sang on “Impressions.” “The way that Lucius is engineered is to be exactly that because it’s functionally a band, but it’s also two people who are melding their melodies and their harmonies together, so there’s an innate understanding of how to think of melody in that way.” 

Goldsmith, who has traded studio sessions with Lucius and embarked on a joint “tag team” tour where Dawes and Lucius played each other’s songs together, goes a step further. “Jess and Holly take anything that comes their way and make it better,” says the musician, who played guitar on “Stranger Danger,” one of the standout tracks from Lucius. “Everyone already knows that they’re incredible singers, but they use their voices to really make the song stronger, not just remind people how good they are at singing. Any time I’ve played with them, they seem to have a natural sense of how to lift up the whole. Everyone feels stronger and better at music than they would if Jess and Holly weren’t there.” 

That warmth and assuredness comes from Wolfe and Laessig’s decades-long friendship. As the story goes, they initially met through a roommate at the Berklee College of Music in 2005 and quickly established their signature combination of vocals, which eventually grew to include matching wigs and onstage outfits. “We admired each other’s talent and we both were just game,” Wolfe says over Zoom from Laessig’s Los Angeles backyard. “There never was a pause. We just did it, and then we kept doing it. We both were committed to doing it.” 

Asked if they ever used to trade vocals before figuring out that meshing them worked so well, they both respond in unison: “No, not really,” as if to underscore the point. “From the very beginning, that was it,” Laessig says. “I remember we even had a lesson, and [the teacher] was like, ‘Well, some people do it this way and some people do it that way.’ And we were like, ‘We both want to sing the whole time, so I guess we just will.’” 

Casual fans might not be able to note the differences in their voices, or who is singing which part on a particular song, but Molad— who joined Lucius in 2010 and often serves as a producer, a role he assumed on Lucius and the 2024 rerecording of the band’s breakout, 2013’s Wildewoman—knows exactly what makes their voices distinct.   

“If you listen to their voices individually, they sound like two totally different people,” he says. “When I’m treating their vocals, I’m treating them quite differently because I’m ultimately trying to make one, bulbous entity. Jess is kind of like a dart in this lower register. When I hear Lucius, I hear Jess’ voice, and then I hear Holly sort of wrapping around Jess and being the tonal center. Holly is just an incredible blender. If you’re on a car trip with Holly and you’re listening to music that she knows, she’s always in the back, just slightly humming along a harmony, to the point where she’s just blending in with the record. It’s fun and it’s cool because sometimes you get a single vocal and you’re like, ‘I wish there was more.’ With Jess and Holly, it feels like it’s produced from the first moment they’re singing together.” 

If that ease of singing together is core to what makes Lucius so compelling, then it’s the collaboration between Molad and Lalish that brings it all together. Before Lucius, Molad and Lalish met playing together in singer Elizabeth Ziman’s indie-pop band Elizabeth & The Catapult. At the time, Molad and Wolfe were dating—they have since married and subsequently divorced— and Molad and Lalish were having creative differences with Ziman. “So when Jess and Holly sort of were coaxing me into joining the band, I was like, ‘Since y’all are musical sisters, we should bring my musical brother into this group,’” Molad says. “The secret sauce of Lucius is that Jess and Holly are ‘one element,’ in that they have a very specific style and taste, and Pete and I are very different. There’s this tug of war of Pete and I generally wanting things to be weirder, for lack of a better word, and eventually, we find our middle ground where we’re all happy. I think that’s what makes the music what it is.” 

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Lucius, released last May, was preceded by Wildewoman (The New Recordings) in 2024, a “Taylor’s Version”-style reimagining of the band’s proper debut, Wildewoman—the first Lucius album to feature the lineup’s four mainstay members and establish their infectious indie-Americana sound. The bulk of the recording for both projects took place at Altamira Sound in LA and were interwoven, to some extent, so reconstructing Wildewoman influenced the back-to-basics approach and sound of Lucius.

“We would naturally adjust things on the road for the stage show, and there were certain harmonies we realized we had changed over the years,” Laessig says of Wildewoman, which was reworked with the live versions in mind and features guest vocals from Carlile, Marcus Mumford and Devon Gilfillian. “It was fun to pick apart the first record and remember exactly what we had done and how we had done it. It was fun reliving that process. It was also very informative for our current record and how we approached that.”

After a detour into dance-y pop hooks with outside songwriters and big-name producers like Grammy winners Dave Cobb and Carlile for 2022’s Second Nature, Lucius was a welcome retreat to the core of the band—with some outside help from friends—and plenty of ground up songwriting.

“Second Nature, to me, felt like we went as far away from being a band as the band ever had,” Molad says. “There was a clear attempt to see how far we can take this, trying to elevate the band career-wise and the fact that we had all these resources available to us. After we made that record, I think the general feeling was: ‘This doesn’t feel authentic to us,’ like we chased this goal, and maybe it was just a bit uncomfortable the whole time.”

“We needed that record when it came out,” Wolfe says of Second Nature. “[Molad and] I were going through a divorce. We were all in a pandemic. It was very insular, closed o- and a little dark. And we were looking for the light. We were looking for something sparkly, something fun, something joyful. And that record got us there. It was almost like a fake-it-till-you-make-it situation. But it’s not that we don’t like it or that it necessarily feels inauthentic. It just doesn’t feel like us now.” 

The full Lucius quartet working together in the studio from scratch proved to be fruitful and freeing. “We were just sitting in my studio, pen to paper, acoustic guitar, piano in hand, flushing out ideas together,” Molad says. “Some songs we would start, and it’d be like, ‘What kind of song do we want to write today?’ As a song starts to evolve, I start to build a track, and we’re all responding to one another in real time. It’s the most fun because it feels the most like bringing it back to being in high school and being excited about music and not thinking about it as a job.” 

Fleshing these songs out in their infancy as a group, before bringing in friends who would help solidify them, was a refreshing approach. “It felt so good to be just us,” Wolfe says. “We are such natural collaborators. Obviously, we’ve collaborated together our whole careers, and we’ve spent a lot of time working with other artists and exploring their worlds and landscapes, but we haven’t spent a lot of time in more recent years sitting in a room just us.”

“The ethos I was trying to stay true to for the self-titled record is: ‘Let’s try our darndest to not think about references,’” Molad says. “We’ve been doing this a long time. We all love a lot of different music, and we all know and trust each other at this point. We said, ‘Let’s trust in our own tastes and not feel the need to make it sound like something else that is current or old or whatever.’ And for the most part, we stuck to it.” 

The result is an album that, intentional or not, touches on every era of the band and sounds, well, a lot like Lucius. “Final Days,” a soaring ballad written about an old tree in Laessig’s backyard before it was cut down, recalls the anthemic balladry of Wildewoman, as does the Cunningham collab “Impressions.” You can hear the hooky, synth-y pop sensibility of 2016’s Good Grief on the lush “Hallways.” The sparse, patient ballads “Mad Love” and “ At the End of the Day” capture the spirit of their underrated, stripped-down 2018 acoustic album NUDES. And the funky, groove-based “Gold Rush” wouldn’t sound out of place on Second Nature. 

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Lucius is the first album the band has released since Wolfe, now remarried, joined Laessig as a mother. “There was a lot of pregnancy on that record,” says Laessig, who was carrying her second child while recording the LP. During the sessions, Wolfe took a pregnancy test and thought for sure it was negative. “[Holly] went into the bathroom, took the pregnancy test—this is what best friends do—and was like, ‘It’s positive. I see a double line!’” Wolfe recalls.  

Recently, Laessig opened Instagram and a bit of the Lucius cut “Old Tape,” a War on Drugs-inspired collaboration with that band’s leader Granduciel, started playing. “My daughter’s ears perked up, I thought, ‘Oh, interesting, because we were recording ‘Old Tape’ a week before I had her.’”

Now they bring their young kids on tour, giving the backstage a daycare vibe. “They just adore each other,” Wolfe says of her and Laessig’s children. “I love having that energy backstage,” Molad says. “It fills you with life. Instead of having alcohol backstage and having four drinks before a show, you’re seeing a child laugh for 20 minutes.” 

Since releasing Lucius, the band has headlined gigs across the U.S., joined Mumford & Sons’ Festival Express inspired Railroad Revival Tour and opened for Carlile for three nights at Red Rocks with a string quartet. They’ve also released an EP of Lucius leftovers, Joyride and a stirring live cover of R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.” Molad is also currently producing a concept album for a musical with Broadway aspirations. 

As for what’s next, there’s still one unreleased project in the can that takes Lucius to new psychedelic and orchestral planes. 

“It is a crazy album, sort of like a rock opera,” Molad says. “We spent like five years on that record, if not longer. It took so many different iterations and so many different people got involved.” 

“Sometimes I’m like, ‘Let’s just put it out and not even tell anyone,’” Laessig adds. “And then other days, I’m like, ‘No, it’s just one of those things that requires a little more planning.’” 

For Wolfe and Laessig, there’s still a few dream collaborators on the joint bucket list—Dolly Parton, Neil Young— but 20 years in, the members of Lucius seem content with their current balance between work, life and art.

“At different steps along the way, I think it was made clear that we were doing what we were supposed to be doing,” Wolfe says. “What we do is unique and special—not just for other people but for ourselves. We do what we love and call it our work. Even though it can be exhausting and trying at times, and we have to motivate ourselves, at least we have each other.”