“It felt like when you’re driving full force and you hit a wall,” says Jess Wolfe. “Then, we were finally still and everything just came out.” The singer and co-frontwoman of the indie-pop quintet Lucius, who is currently ensconced in a corner of a Brooklyn bar, is referring to the process of writing the band’s sophomore album, Good Grief, which dropped in March. After a whirlwind touring cycle for their 2013 debut, Wildewoman, Wolfe and her musical counterpart, Holly Laessig, finally had some down time to bring together all the notes and song ideas they had amassed in various journals and voice memos while on the road.

Now Wolfe and Laessig are sitting side by side, sporting their usual matching outfits— topped off with twin undercut-updo hairstyles—happily finishing each other’s sentences. “That’s how it felt,” Wolfe offers. “Like you were going too fast to realize…”

“To realize what was going on around you,” Laessig finishes. “It was a constant intake. There was really just no time to pause. People are like, ‘So, did you write when you were on the road?’ And I’m thinking: ‘If we had even attempted to do something like that, we wouldn’t have slept, ever.”’

When there was finally time for rest, the longtime Brooklyn residents opted for another journey. “Having gotten off the road after two-and-a-half years of touring, we decided that we were going to get into the van once more and drive cross-country and move to Los Angeles—try our hand at the West Coast,” Wolfe recalls. “We’d been gone from Brooklyn for a long time, and although we felt attached to certain places, and certain areas conjured up memories—still do, obviously— it was just time to try and find a real respite and see if a different place would reflect in our songs, see if that would enable us.”

Wolfe and Laessig met at a house party while attending Berklee College of Music, where they found each other to be wearing the same outfit— a practice they have adopted and honed in the years since— and quickly became songwriting partners, moving to Brooklyn together in 2007. Once in New York, they received a graduate-level education in the music industry by regularly popping into open mics and playing small clubs. At the time, Wolfe was working as a booking agent for a Westchester company that represented bigger soul artists like Patti LaBelle and The O’Jays. “The open mics afforded us the opportunity to really start writing, knowing other people were going to hear our songs,” Wolfe says. “At least those 15 people that were there at the open mic nights every Tuesday.”
One of the first steady open-mic nights the duo attended was at Brooklyn’s Bar 4, which shuttered in 2013. As a final farewell to the venue that had fostered their early aspirations, Wolfe and Laessig played an emotional set at the space just before it closed its doors. According to Wolfe, the performance was memorable in more than one way.

“We got totally hammered,” she says. “Made total fools of ourselves.”

“I went onstage and you were crying,” Laessig remembers, laughing. “I don’t even know what I said, but it was a total shit show. It must’ve been fun for people to watch—or terribly awkward.”

Shit show aside, the night showed the importance of their Brooklyn community, especially in those early days.

“Community was something that we were looking for—for a long time,” Wolfe says. “As young people, we didn’t really have a musical community separate of each other. Both of us struggled with the fact that we didn’t have a lot of people that we could relate to, and we didn’t really feel welcomed into a certain community. [When we] moved to New York together, there was such a shift there—such an open-arms experience—that [although] we might have not really known what we were doing, we felt comfortable making mistakes and falling on our face, knowing that we had other people there beside us. Yay for Brooklyn.”

Lucius’ current lineup formally came together through the recording process of Wildewoman, with Wolfe and Laessig initially teaming up with producer, drummer and fellow Berklee alum Dan Molad. Soon after, they added two more Berklee-trained players, guitarist Peter Lalish and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Burri, into the fold. Wolfe and Molad are now married and, along with Laessig, recently sought out a new community in Los Angeles, where they wrote and recorded Good Grief. According to Wolfe, much of the writing took place in various Airbnb locales before the group “landed in this amazing respite on top of the mountain in Montecito Heights called the Glass House,” where the writing was completed and the recording commenced.

Once the songs began to take form, it became obvious to the group that the well of experience they draw from has deepened. “You can’t not learn so much about yourself and about the people that you’re surrounding yourself with if you spend that much time away from home, constantly surrounded in a new place every single day with very little sleep, very little alone time,” Wolfe says about their nonstop touring schedule. “We learned so much, and we had incredible opportunities and moments and feelings—and also really dark ones. I think that the record definitely reflects that sentiment.”

Good Grief opens with “Madness,” a melodic, slow-burning track that introduces one of the album’s themes in its title and chorus. Later, “Gone Insane” reinforces the idea, allowing the singers to explore their thoughts on personal relationships, causing one to question their own sanity, or at least have others question it. “Go on, call me the one who’s gone insane,” they sing defiantly. “Oh, I will be the one who’s gone insane.” The album delves deeply into such themes, a fact that both Wolfe and Laessig readily admit and embrace. “‘Gone Insane’ felt like purging,” Wolfe says. “You feel a feeling coming on and, all of a sudden, you’re sick and it just comes out. Those are the songs that can’t be helped.”

“It’s certainly darker than Wildewoman,” Laessig agrees. “And I feel a real growth as songwriters and partners.”

“There is good that comes from grief,” Wolfe says, invoking the album’s title. “There’s good that comes from being lonely and being sad and feeling at a loss. All of those feelings can overwhelm you to a point of exclamation—‘Good grief!’ You know, how many times can we complain about feeling a certain way? We were sort of poking fun at our own cry, if that makes any sense.”

The album’s closer, “Dusty Trails,” features lyrics that come straight from life on the road. “Everyone’s around and I’m still alone,” they sing, encapsulating the juxtaposition of loneliness and togetherness that artists regularly feel on tour. “Constantly [having] a feeling of needing to get away from it but, at the same time, thriving off being all together in this van,” Wolfe says. “Or feeling depressed or dark loneliness, but at the same time, there are people coming out to see you every night and singing along to the words that you’ve written. It’s such a mishmash of feelings, and sometimes it’s easy to latch onto the dark ones, but it’s also important to reflect and remember the joys. I do think the record honors that.”

Lucius’ lyrics can feel extremely personal, but Wolfe and Laessig don’t differentiate between talking between themselves and sharing their thoughts with thousands of fans. “You can’t help it—it just comes out,” Laessig says. “It’s just like venting, needing to talk to somebody. Except when you’re writing a song, you have the time to really think about what you want to say and how you want to say it, and it opens your own eyes to your experience.” She believes it then goes one step further when they receive feedback on the songs, sometimes with interpretations that they hadn’t intended. “Then it becomes a conversation,” she says.

“The record is an open door, and you’re walking into a room where two close friends are really talking about heavy shit,” Laessig continues. “And, in the middle, you’ve got your cigarette break, you know? There are those moments, too—like, ‘God, give me a shot of whiskey.’” She points to the two-song run of “Almighty Gosh” into “Born Again Teen,” the bombastic lead single, as the point in Good Grief where the good finally outweighs the grief. “Something to kind of save yourself from drowning,” Wolfe adds.

Now that Good Grief has officially dropped, Lucius are jumping right back on the road, following up a European tour in April with a summer of headlining dates and a slew of U.S. festivals. Though they are still relatively young musicians, the band has all but perfected their live show, which allows Wolfe and Laessig to shine as the focal point of their percussive, engulfing brand of pop. They certainly enjoy the spotlight, but there’s also a much deeper connection that they feel through the performance aspect of their art.

“There’s something about live shows and live music that’s bigger than the person or the people,” Laessig says. “Something just turns on when you see other people onstage, or even when you yourself are onstage. When the show’s on, you enter this other world, this other thing takes over, and it’s not about you or what you’re doing or each individual performer.”

Lucius have become a fixture of the increasingly important festival scene, and the group welcomes both the excitement and difficulties that are inevitable on the summer circuit. “You see a lot of familiar faces, and it’s sort of like this traveling circus/family reunion every few festivals,” says Wolfe. “It can be really fun, but it’s also kind of a challenge—a good challenge— because more than half the people there most likely aren’t there to see you in particular, the way that they are for a headlining show. They’re not coming to your show; they’re just checking you out. So you have to deliver.”
Perhaps Wolfe and Laessig’s true festival coronation took place at last year’s Newport Folk when one of their idols, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, called on them to sing backing vocals. The opportunity arose out of Lucius’ budding relationship with My Morning Jacket, whom they met through a good friend who is married to MMJ bassist Tom Blankenship. Lucius had already started covering the Jacket’s song “Wonderful,” and were eventually invited to Forecastle Festival in My Morning Jacket’s hometown of Louisville, Ky.

“Story has it that Jim [James] hears ‘Wonderful’ being sung across the field, and he comes over and watches,” Wolfe says. “A couple of months later, we were invited to come out [on tour] with them. They had us singing on a bunch of their songs, and there was just a real bond.”

The rumor that My Morning Jacket were slated to back Waters at Newport Folk started circulating before the event, and when that became a reality, Wolfe and Laessig were invited to join in. It turns out that Jay Sweet, the festival’s promoter, got a call from Waters and the singer inquired about backing vocals for his performance.

“He said, ‘I have just the girls for you,’” Wolfe remembers. “And he called us up and said, ‘What are you doing this particular weekend in July?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know, you tell me!’ He said, ‘What do you think about singing background for Roger Waters?’ And I said, ‘I think that’s a great idea! I think you should definitely make that happen!’”

Although the two were originally only supposed to sit in for a couple of songs, Waters kept them out for more of his set. “We had one rehearsal the day before Newport, and we got there and sang a song, and Roger seemed really happy,” Wolfe recalls. “We sat down for a song we weren’t going to sing on, he starts playing the guitar and singing, and he stops mid-verse and looks over to us and goes, ‘Man up! You’re singing on every song.’ And we’re like, ‘Oh, fuck! OK, we’re singing on every song.’ So we crammed that night and performed the next day.
“I’m still pinching myself— I know we both are. The rain started pouring down during ‘Mother,’ and people are sobbing out there. The rain’s just hitting their faces and you can’t tell what’s a tear and what’s a raindrop. It was a spiritual experience.”

The performance yielded an especially profound lesson, giving Lucius a boost of confidence as they held their own with Waters and My Morning Jacket. “We all have our own set of worries and insecurities, and I feel like we could all relate, being in that room,” Wolfe says. “Jim is equally excited and probably nervous to play with his hero, and Holly and I are feeling somewhat unprepared and overjoyed, at the same time, to be singing with two of our favorite artists ever. It’s an emotional experience and yet, there’s a real sense of community there—they made it known to us that we were now a part of their musical family. I’ll never forget that.”