Lucius took a decade to go from a blueprint to where the Brooklyn band is today, but sometimes good things happen to those who struggle to find their footing. That’s borne out by what frontwomen—and fabulously styling besties—Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe are up to when they’re tracked down by the Georgia Straight. The two singers have just flown into Toronto, where they’re getting ready for what sounds like the coolest show you won’t see this year.

“We’re doing this project with David Byrne, and the first two nights are in Toronto at the Air Canada Centre,” Wolfe says, speaking from a Hogtown hotel room. “It’s called Contemporary Color, and it’s based on colour guard. Do you know what that is?’ ”

When the answer is no, the excited singer is more than happy to elaborate.

“It originated in the military, with flags and the tossing of bayonets and rifles and things,” she says. “Now it’s become contemporary dance with those things incorporated. It’s quite beautiful, so David Byrne has had the idea for the past couple of years to take a bunch of different artists and have them each compose a piece based on a theme. Our theme is [Alfred] Hitchcock and we’re assigned a colour guard team.”

Laessig and Wolfe are part of a 500-strong crew of colour-guard performers, choreographers, and stagehands. While at the Air Canada Centre, they’ll be in the mix with musical heavy hitters that include St. Vincent’s Annie Clarke, Ad-Rock and Money Mark of the Beastie Boys, tUnE-yArDs, Nellie Furtado, and of course the former Talking Head.

Hanging with such high-wattage talents isn’t new to the two Lucius founders, which probably reduces the odds of being starstruck when they hit the upcoming Vancouver Folk Music Festival.

“We finished up last year opening up for Jack White in Europe,” Wolfe says. “It’s been a wild couple of years, really exhausting, but also a really special experience, seeing the world while doing something that we love.”

Given Jack White’s reputation as one of the most sartorially splendid figures in modern music, it makes sense that he would stumble onto Lucius. The same goes for Byrne, who—even at the age of 63—remains one of pop’s most committed risk-takers.

After years of struggling, Lucius—which includes drummer Dan Molad, and guitarists Peter Lalish and Andrew Burri—was finally pegged as a breakout act last year. This was partly because of what the band accomplished with the lushly detailed Wildewoman and partly because of the impression that Wolfe and Laessig make whenever they take the stage.

On the sonic side of things, the group’s breakthrough suggests that the various members of Lucius have record collections to die for. Standing back and looking at the big picture, the band favours a reverb-swamped sound that connects the dots between the Raveonettes and Phil Spec­tor. But there’s more going on than a retro-flavoured wall of sound, with “Wildewoman” improbably mixing glacial chamber pop with no-bullshit roots rock, “Don’t Just Sit There” cranking the amps till they billow ’70s bong smoke, and “Monsters” giving an art-damaged exercise in Carnival of Souls weirdness.

What might really have caught the eye of White and Byrne, though, is the way that Lucius pays detailed attention to more than the music. The band’s visual aces are Laessig and Wolfe, who, in addition to singing in unison, dress identically on-stage. Their devotion to being on the same stylistic page is so obsessive that they even make hair-salon appointments together.

All this garnered Lucius no shortage of attention after the release of Wildewoman, with everyone from the New York Times to the Guardian to NPR heaping praise on the group. Both singers—who first bonded at a party a decade ago, while studying at Boston’s Berklee College of Music—acknowledge that the recognition was doubly gratifying because they’d been at it so long. In the years leading up to Wildewoman, bandmates came and went, a debut album was released and disowned, and traction was hard to find.

And then things started to happen in a big way, which Laessig wasn’t completely prepared for.

“The Jack White tour was a really good way to end the whole cycle for Wildewoman,” she offers after Wolfe hands off the phone. “Right before that, we were all sort of on our last legs. I think we were home about 13 days all of last year, or something like that. That was the hardest. You constantly feel like you don’t have anywhere to land, and your relationships suffer if they are long-distance ones. So there were lows.”

Still, Wolfe and Laessig are living a dream that goes back to their childhoods. Wolfe grew up in Los Angeles, interested in art and music but something of a loner, although not necessarily by choice.

“I didn’t really have a big group of friends,” she relates. “I just felt kind of alone, even though I didn’t really feel like an introvert. I wanted to be part of a group, but that didn’t really seem available to me for whatever reason. It was almost like I wasn’t providing something that other people were looking for. I just wasn’t cool enough.”

Laessig was raised in Cleveland, the daughter of visual artists.

“I was always surrounded by artists,” she recalls. “It’s funny—a couple of months ago I came across this book that I put together in third grade. I found it at my mom’s house. It was this book that the teacher put together, with each student in the class saying what they want to be when they grow up. I’m going through it, and kids are like, ‘I wanna be an ice skater. I wanna be a firefighter.’

“I get to mine,” Laessig continues, “and it’s like, ‘I want to live and travel in a motor home, travel all across the States, and also live in Europe.’ I also said, ‘I want to adopt children and be a woodworker in my free time. And I’m going to be an artist, because that is my special interest.’ As I was reading this back, I was like, ‘This is so out-there, but you know what? It’s actually not that far off.’ ”

Lucius started to come together at Berklee, when Laessig and Wolfe met through their roommates and quickly bonded over the likes of David Bowie, Otis Redding, and, above all, the Beatles. At the time both were already fixated on a career in music.

“I always knew that I wanted to make art—be an artist,” Laessig says. “But the music part wasn’t clear until the sophomore year of high school. And then that was it—I was like, ‘If I don’t get into music school, then I’m not going anywhere else. That’s the only thing I want to do.’ ”

Wolfe adds: “I had a wild imagination as a kid—I spent a lot of time dreaming. Music was part of that. I was singing from a young age—as soon as I could talk. My parents were luckily able to afford singing and piano lessons, and that was something that I always looked forward to. I still talk to my singing teacher from my youth today. Singing was a real safety zone for me.”

Laessig and Wolfe initially planned to cover the Beatles’ White Album for school, and although that didn’t come together, it did tip them off to something that continues to define Lucius to this day. While working on a version of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” they discovered they sounded better singing in unison than when one of them was simply providing harmony. A subsequent move to New York found the two burning through bandmates until they hooked up with studio veteran and drumming ace Molad, who later became Wolfe’s husband.

Wildewoman has proven to have serious legs, which explains why, a year and a half after its release, Lucius is still on the road, playing bigger and better gigs than Laessig and Wolfe ever dreamed of a half-decade ago. Having been at work on a Wildewoman follow-up for much of this year, the singers are happy to be hitting the road for the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, which—thanks to its location in Jericho Park—will quite possibly join Lucius’s list of greatest gigs ever. And, yes, there have been some great ones.

“The Newport Folk Festival was one of them that was really awesome,” Laessig gushes. “We sang with Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy. Playing the O2 arena in London with Jack White was incredible, and just touring Europe in general was great—they treat their artists really well, and you get to see so much stuff.”

And that’s enough to make up for the bad days, which are increasingly few and far between.

“I was thinking today about middle school, and how I promised myself, ‘I am never going to have a 9-to-5 job, and I’m never going to work in a cubicle—that’s so not me,’ ” Laessig says. “Then I was in the car going, ‘Well, that must actually be pretty nice—to be able to separate your work from your downtime.’ But that’s when you have to go, ‘Noooo—remember your young self!’ It’s nice to daydream about that kind of life, but I know that if I wasn’t doing music, I’d be in bad shape. All this is definitely worth it. And I really couldn’t picture doing anything else.”

Lucius plays the Vancouver Folk Music Festival’s Main Stage on Sunday (July 19).