Sometimes it takes a while to get things right, this being the case for Brooklyn’s Lucius, a project that stretches back nearly a decade to a party that happened while singers Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe were at Berklee College in Boston. Today, the five-piece is working its stellar release Wildewoman, which has been hailed as a richly layered triumph by everyone from the New York Times to NPR. Getting the attention of high-profile tastemakers wasn’t, however, an overnight process.

Long before numerous lineup changes and the release of a debut album that’s since been basically disowned, there was the initial bonding session between the band’s singers, Laessig and Wolfe. That took place at a get-together where the two formerly casual acquaintances discovered they shared common musical tastes. By the time the night was over, they were determined to collaborate, their ambitiousness evident right from the start.

Reached in a tour van making its way through Arizona, Laessig has no trouble recalling the details of that night.

“Our roommates had become friends, so we sort of knew each other,” she says. “We respected each other and sort of hung out here and there, but I didn’t really get to know her until I went to her apartment one night with my old roommate. It was later in the night, and there was a lot of red wine, so I sat down with Jess and really, for the first time, had a conversation. We talked about influences, and she said, ‘I’d really like to work on a project with you.’ I said, ‘Sure.’ ”

Those influences included the likes of Otis Redding, David Bowie, and the Beatles. The project was to offer a fresh take on a cultural landmark.

“We kind of planned on a ‘White Album’ cover show for school,” Laessig says. “So we got together the following morning to hash it out. We worked on ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’ and then recorded it. We weren’t sure how we were going to split up the verses or when we were going to sing harmony—we didn’t want to sing harmony the whole time. At one point, we both started singing the melody at the same time and thought, ‘That sounds really cool—let’s try that.’ That was sort of how we found a third voice.”

Skip forward to a move to New York. Wolfe and Laessig quickly realized they worked well together, to the point where they were willing to spend a good decade assembling the pieces that would become Lucius.

“We put out one record a long time ago that was basically a different project under the same name,” Laessig says. “We decided that we wanted to veer away from what we were doing and do something more energetic, and more interesting.”

Enter Lucius drummer Dan Molad, a studio ace who can take credit for the many sonic flourishes that make Wildewoman one of the best records you likely didn’t hear in 2013.

“We started working together under the pretence of having no expectations or real plans,” Laessig notes of the drummer coming onboard, bringing guitarist Peter Lalish with him. “What we were really into was experimenting. We were all sort of in a state of limbo where we were looking for something new and exciting, something that was going to stir things up.”

Lucius was solidified by the addition of guitarist Andrew Burri, whom Molad was familiar with thanks to his studio work. Live gigging spurred an overhaul of the band’s sound, leading to Wildewoman, a record that suggests that the Raveonettes and Dum Dum Girls aren’t the only folks in New York fascinated with the sound that Phil Spector made famous in the ’60s.

This shouldn’t suggest, however, that Wildewoman belongs on a mix tape somewhere between the Ronettes and the Supremes. The echo-drenched title track seems as indebted to Sigur Rós as it is to the Bloodshot Records roster, while the electro-clashed “Turn It Around” leaves one thinking that M.I.A. might get some airtime in the tour van. The guitar-heavy “Hey, Doreen” pushes the recording needle into White Light/White Heat territory, the band then getting its Crazy Horse on for “Don’t Just Sit There”.

Elsewhere, Lucius’s members are just as likely to roll out the turbo-charged, pure-sugar goodness (“Tempest”) as they are to embrace their inner art stars (the flamenco-tinted, abandoned-carnival oddity “Monsters” is something Tom Waits might enjoy during his monthly bath).

The band’s secret weapons, fittingly, are Laessig and Wolfe, who, having stumbled onto something good out of the gate back in Berklee, sing in unison throughout the songs. Their symbiosis doesn’t stop there, as the two display a complete commitment to aesthetics by dressing alike on-stage, and even heading to the hairdresser together to ensure they match head-to-toe.

Given the amount of touring that Lucius has been doing, Laessig says, their sisters-in-arms approach requires some planning.

“From the beginning, we’ve tried to coordinate our outfits,” Laessig says. “As our whole vocal-duality thing took place and became a theme, the way that we dressed became thematic as well. We mostly do online shopping. Because we’re touring so much, we’ll have stuff shipped to venues, including extra sizes, which means shipping a lot of stuff back. That’s really the only way that we could do stuff.”

Time these days, she adds, is indeed hard to come by, so much so that Lucius has sort of accepted that some things were long ago doomed to the back burner.

“We never finished the White Album idea, and never put on a show,” she notes. “Instead, we started getting together every few days and working on songs. And that was that.”

Well, not totally—what it really was was the start of a friendship that’s slowly blossomed into something wonderful.

“It’s been a long process,” Laessig acknowledges. “But I think the record sounds the way that it does because we’ve been at this a long time and really wanted to get it right.”

Lucius plays the Media Club on Monday (February 10).