By simply getting dressed and appearing onstage, even the most fashion-averse musicians can become synonymous with a certain look. But when musicians make their style aesthetic central to their overall artistic identity, they stand to elevate their work to a new level of cohesion and expression. David Bowie turned stage wear into an art form as Ziggy Stardust in the early ’70s, and everyone from Prince to Björk to André 3000 followed suit. A similar sense of stylistic theatricality fuels Lucius.
The Brooklyn quintet consists of two women with powerful voices and a keen sense of melody, backed by three men who switch among guitar, bass, and drums. They draw on a mix of pop, indie rock, and classic girl-groups with songs that emphasize synchronous vocals, lush synthesizers, and staccato bursts of rhythm. But their outfits are what you notice first.
The musicians dress in bold, coordinated costumes that are as much a part of the Lucius essence as their songs, “almost like you were being cradled in a visual and aural sense together, not just one without the other,” says singer Jess Wolfe. She and fellow vocalist Holly Laessig wear identical outfits when they’re performing — and sometimes when they’re not — with perfectly matching accessories and hairstyles. The men, Dan Molad, Peter Lalish, and Andrew Burri, also dress identically in clothes coordinated with what the women are wearing. From Motown vocal groups to the Beatles, matching outfits are — or at least used to be — common as stagewear; there's something fresh and precise about the way Lucius does it.
“It’s two voices singing as one, and all five of us working together to create a sonic fabric, and that’s something that we wanted to represent in a visual way,” says Laessig, who sings onstage facing Wolfe across symmetrical banks of keyboards, flanked by the men, who play standing in a loose semi-circle around them.
Building a distinctive look is one thing; maintaining it is another, especially when the look requires a collective approach that doesn’t leave much room for individual personalities to stand out. “It’s a big commitment,” Laessig says. “Once you jump into something like that, you have to be consistent, and the days when you don’t want to do it, you have to do it.”
As Lucius has grown, the band’s style has developed, too. Wolfe and Laessig began singing together after meeting at Boston's Berklee College of Music in 2005. They moved to Brooklyn in 2007 and were essentially a duo with a supporting cast on Songs From the Bromley House, the little-heard album they released in 2009. They began expanding their sound (and their lineup) with an exploratory, sometimes tentative self-titled EP in 2012. The more assured and expansive LP Wildewoman followed in 2013, while Lucius honed a more pop-forward approach on Good Grief, released last week. Writing the new album was a way of processing the memories and feelings that piled up during all the time they spent on tour, and they say the bigger and more energetic feel of the songs reflects what their stage show has become.
Though Wolfe and Laessig wanted a strong visual presence from the start of the band, wearing identical outfits came as a revelation. “There was a good while at the beginning of our musical partnership where we were uncomfortable onstage, and the moment we started dressing alike, there was a moment of relief,” Wolfe says. “It’s like a uniform. We’re an automatic unit the moment we get dressed.”
She and Laessig style the band themselves, collecting images and color palettes that seem to fit with the music. Along the way, they’ve experimented with mod fashion, stylized geometric patterns, metallic fabrics and, when the band performed earlier this month on “Colbert," chartreuse capes (also seen above) designed by Christian Joy, arguably rock's most beloved stage costumer over the last decade, who's created iconic looks for Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O, Santigold, and Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes.
“The outfits are such a representation of what we see as we’re writing songs,” Wolfe says. “We’re always talking about what color our record might be to us, and we don’t always see it as the same color.”
Though some of the changes in their style reflect a consciously evolving aesthetic, others are more grounded in the reality of life on tour: Spending a lot of time on the road over the past few years has given the musicians a sense what shapes and colors work best onstage. “There were also other factors in the look, like bleach killing our hair and us having to change the color,” Laessig says.
Damaged hair, and occasionally being mistaken for 30-year-old twins who still dress alike, aren’t the only risks to establishing such an idiosyncratic visual persona. The musicians acknowledge that the identical dress, and their symmetrical stage setup, can come across as gimmicks, especially at first glance. “There are always going to be people who feel like, ‘Oh, they’re trying too hard,’ or it’s disingenuous,” says Molad, who is married to Wolfe.
While the musicians hope that listeners skeptical of their look will give the songs a chance anyway, it’s not something they can control. “The truth is that you either get it or you don’t, and you’re either willing to experience it and give it a shot or you’re not,” Wolfe says. “Do we really want the people who are going to look at us and automatically be deeply opposed? Do we really want those people to be affecting how we’re moving forward in any way?”
Probably not, which speaks to another of Wolfe and Laessig’s motivations. After feeling like outsiders as teens, both women see the combination of sound and style in Lucius as a way to offer what Wolfe calls a “make-believe magical world” away from the drab moments of everyday existence.
“If we can help other kids to feel like they’re escaping,” she says, “and escape is a word of avoidance, but I mean it in the sense of being carried away from the immediate problems in your life for a moment of joy, that would be a mission accomplished.”