Every Lucius song begins with what Holly Laessig calls “coffee talks,” in which she and Jess Wolfe share what’s on their minds—and in the spring of 2020, they had a lot to discuss. Since 2007, Laessig and Wolfe have written this way, learning each other’s stories by heart before weaving them into the lyrics and chord progressions of their inventive indie-pop anthems. Onstage, they’re two identically-dressed and coiffed halves of the same whole, the mirror image of each other at the microphone; off-stage, they step into their respective lives—separate, but close—as chosen family. They’ve shared countless joys as they’ve seen the world while touring behind their 2013 debut album, Wildewoman, and its follow-up, 2016’s Good Grief, but they’ve weathered profound losses and lows together, too. And when one of them experiences a seismic shift that shakes their world, the other is there to listen, and reflect, in order to help write through it.

Second Nature, Lucius’ third album, is the closest thing yet to the musical versions of these intimate conversations. “We’ve gotten so used to helping each other write about very personal things,” says Laessig. “It’s funny because Second Nature makes perfect sense as a title: it’s become second nature to write for each other. A lot of what we wrote about on the record were things we hadn’t talked about before: there wasn’t a readiness to face some of those things.”

“People caught wind of us as supporting vocalists, and a lot of artists started inquiring if we’d sing on their records,” says Laessig, who, alongside Wolfe, recorded with Sheryl Crow, Harry Styles, Ozzy Osborne, John Legend, The War on Drugs, and Brandi Carlile, to name a few, before the close of 2019. “It was flattering and honorable to sing with so many people we've admired, but after a while, there was an urgency to get back to focusing on the record we needed to make for ourselves. Just as we were doing that, the pandemic hit.”

Co-produced by Carlile, their longtime friend, collaborator, and champion, and Dave Cobb, whose production credits have earned handfuls of Grammys and industry-wide accolades, Second Nature is a new chapter for Lucius in more ways than one. They left Los Angeles and decamped to Nashville in March of 2020, where they crashed with Crow (and wrote their first song for the album, “The Man I’ll Never Find,” on the piano in her living room). They opened themselves up to co-writing, which they’d never done before, and incorporated voices besides their own (both Carlile and Crow contributed backing vocals). Laessig and Wolfe also met separate, but substantial, inflection points while bringing Second Nature into being. Laessig became pregnant with and welcomed her first child. Wolfe and Molad, who had not seen each other since finalizing their divorce, reunited in the studio. There, they commenced with their new normal as bandmates and proceeded to navigate these songs that were directly inspired by what they’d just lived through.