Stream: Lucius, ‘Next to Normal’

Kevin Bronson on January 11th, 2022

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Want a three-minute break from viruses and variants and deviants and deviousness? Lucius has a little disco amnesia that’ll warm your climate.

“Next to Normal” introduces “Second Nature,” the new album from the L.A.-based duo of Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe, who have been typically busy as collaborators but haven’t released any of their own music since 2018’s acoustic endeavor, “Nudes.”

The album, out April 8, was produced by Brandi Carlile (who, along with Sheryl Crow, guests on one track) and Grammy-winning David Cobb.

Of the album, Wolfe says: “It is a record that begs you not to sit in the difficult moments, but to dance through them. It touches upon all these stages of grief — and some of that is breakthrough, by the way. Being able to have the full spectrum of the experience that we have had, or that I’ve had in my divorce, or that we had in lockdown, having our careers come to a halt, so to speak. I think you can really hear and feel the spectrum of emotion and hopefully find the joy in the darkness. It does exist. That’s why we made ‘Second Nature’ and why we wanted it to sound the way it did: Our focus was on dancing our way through the darkness.”

||| Stream: “Next to Normal”