St. Lucia (Jean-Philip Grobler and Patti Beranek), Photo: Xander Ferreira.

In recent music videos and live performances, St. Lucia band members and spouses Jean-Philip Grobler and Patti Beranek wear matching bright red outfits in the middle of expansive desert landscapes. The videos, filmed on a road trip in South Africa, Grobler’s home country, are surreal and dreamy, just like the music on their new record, Fata Morgana: Dawn.

This unique visual world was built with the couple’s close friend Xander Ferreira, a new process for the two, who usually do everything themselves.

“What’s so important in creative relationships is different perspectives,” Grobler said in a recent call. “Xander helped us build a new mythology, telling us to not be the same nice and relatable St. Lucia anymore and instead to be these two weird characters that do weird things and just stand there weirdly, which is not something that we generally naturally do.”

“What do you mean? You don’t normally just stand there weirdly?” Beranek interrupted.

“It’s true that I’ve been known to stand weirdly,” Grobler replied, laughing.

The songs on Fata Morgana: Dawn are often just as playful as the couple’s conversation. Singles like “Pie in the Sky” and “Rolling Man” are jubilant and comforting, filled with abstract musings about universal ambition, nostalgic guitar strums and soaring strings. “We belong on the other side of fear/ See the lights in the stairs as you go/ I guess we’ll never know the fear of falling,” Grobler belts on hopeful single “Fear of Falling.”

As with much of their discography, these tracks radiate positivity, but Grobler said that impact is not directly intentional. “No artist wants to be thought of as one-dimensional,” he said. “When people say, ‘Your music feels so positive,’ you start to think, ‘Oh, well, everyone just thinks that your songs are these happy songs.’

“But I appreciate that people get that out of the music,” he continued. “We get messages all the time, and I feel so lucky to get these messages, that we’ve helped someone through a horrible illness or a loved one dying. Both of us tend to be most moved by songs that make you feel connected to the universe, or as if they express something about the truth of existence, which is both terrible and beautiful at the same time.”

The Fata Morgana: Dawn tracklist was mostly written before the band’s 2022 effort, Utopia. In fact, the two referred to it as their “pandemic record,” written while they were living in upstate New York in 2020. “That time in New York during the pandemic, and that whole weird, lonely, melancholy mood definitely influenced some of the vibe of the record,” Grobler said.

As the pandemic calmed, the couple moved to southern Germany, inspiring them to take an artistic left turn, eventually leading them to Utopia. But they knew they’d return to their unreleased work from 2020 when the feeling was right again.

“The universe also has its own plans in some way,” Grobler said. “You have to kind of know when you’re pushing a boulder up the hill and also when you could maybe just rest the boulder for a second and let time and erosion take care of where the boulder rolls.”

“Everything we do creatively, we do at a certain time in our lives, and it’s an expression of that time. So it’s almost like a time capsule,” Beranek added. “But also, sometimes you write two songs five years apart, and then they find each other and become one song. It’s interesting how that works.”

Once the songs were written and recorded, the band carefully edited and fine-tuned each track, part of a process Grobler compared to gardening.

“You have all these plants that are planted, and they start to grow,” he said. “Then you prune a bit here, you cut a bit there. Gradually, that list gets smaller, and it gets to more detailed and finer needs. Eventually, everything just starts to feel like it’s in balance, and there are less notes. You could change this or that, but it comes down to the feeling.”

While the album is filled with some of St. Lucia’s signature joy, it also leaps outside of the band’s comfort zone.

“It definitely draws on different sides of what we’re influenced by than what we’ve put out in the past,” Grobler said. “It’s less ‘80s and more ‘60s or ‘70s. There’s more of a Beatles, David Bowie and ABBA influence, more than overtly being very synthy.”

“I’m sure some people might not like it, because it’s a different direction, but there’s also still a through line from who we are,” Beranek said. “If you listen to all of our stuff, even though our music can be so different, there’s never a complete departure.”

Pop duo Aly & AJ appear on breezy, relaxed single “Campari Lips & Soda.” The artists wrote the tune together on the last day of a three-day writing session, when they decided to just throw things at the wall to see what would stick.

“There’s more coming from that operation in the future,” Grobler promised.

The band’s lyrics consistently reference nature, an important aspect of life to both Grobler and Beranek. They often find inspiration while on a hike or lying under the stars, and they use archetypes about the sun and the moon to implicitly convey universal emotions.

“It brings up that feeling you get if you watch a sun set or the moon rise, which is a form of love,” Beranek said. “You see that kind of stuff, and it’s magical, and you can’t pinpoint it, and you can’t find the right words for it, but it’s a feeling that you just know. You stand in front of a double rainbow and you’re like, ‘Holy shit.’”

That overwhelming sense of awe is tangible throughout the band’s new songs.

“This album is exciting because it is a bit risky for us. We knew that our fans would love Utopia, whereas this one feels a bit more experimental,” Grobler said. “I’m very thankful to have the freedom to be able to do that, and I want people to know that we put equally the same amount of care and attention and love into everything we do because we love what we do, and we take it seriously.”