Patti Beranek and Jean-Philip Grobler of St. Lucia photographed in South Africa in February 2022. Courtesy Gabrielle Kannemeyer.

Jean-Philip Grobler and Patti Beranek, the primary songwriters in synth-pop band St. Lucia, have kept a low profile for the last few years. After concluding several tours for 2018’s Hyperion, the two largely disappeared from social media. When they eventually emerged, it wasn’t to hype new music but to share their lives as parents of two boys.

The married couple, who moved from New York to Switzerland, have since moved to the German border town of Konstanz, where Beranek is from and her family still lives. They’ve shared videos of playing in snow, sharing lunch and introducing their boys to musical instruments. Every once in a while, they would share a snippet of a song, a sample, some modulated sound on a synthesizer. That’s because while they’ve not been sharing music, the two have remained busy making it.

St. Lucia debuted the first taste of their next musical project on Friday with “Rocket On My Feet,” a pure dance pop number that Grobler said has a dark edge to it. The song is about finding an exit lane off the pandemic highway, but it’s also more than that. Grobler checked in Friday night with some background on the song and the state of St. Lucia.

RIFF: Why did you choose to make your first statement from your next project with this song?

Jean-Philip Grobler: I could talk about this for an hour, lol. First of all, we’ve been away for so long, and in that time we’ve made a ton of new music. Patti and I aren’t writing with other people that much, so pretty much all the work time we spend is on St. Lucia. Obviously, being parents of two keeps us pretty busy as is, but all the rest of our time is spent on this project. This might also be the first time that we have as much music as this truly finished and ready to go, like fully recorded and mixed, etc. I don’t want to say too much too soon; the details will be revealed as we go down the road of this new body of work.

But essentially, we felt that “Rocket” was the fun ray of sunshine that people need in their lives right now, that also happens to have a dark side. I can only speak for us here, but I feel like a lot of people feel this way in that we’re all just so sick of the way the world is right now and of being told what to do and hearing everyone’s opinions on everything on social media, and we just want to live our lives again. That’s sort of what the lyrics deal with. It’s not trying to belittle the pandemic or what people have been through, but from talking to people, I feel like most folks are ready to live and leave this thing behind them, and hopefully we can be the soundtrack to that.

You’ve said the song is a response of sorts to the social media that was just noise to you. In what ways did social media negatively affect you over the past few years?

I wouldn’t say this song in particular is a reaction against social media, but I suppose parts of it are. We took a year and a half break from social media from around September 2019 until March 2021 for a variety of reasons. I was sick of seeing parents at playgrounds staring at their phones instead of actually actively spending time with their kids, and I realized I was doing the same thing.

I also found myself getting jealous of other artists who were having perceived massive success while I was working on music and going through all the natural doubts, etc., that an artist goes through in the inception phase of a new project. So it started as an experiment, really, and then I saw changes in myself, and I felt like my art was getting deeper and less self-conscious. And I was feeling freer and more myself, and so it just kept going. I also read Cal Newport’s books “Digital Minimalism” and “Deep Work,” and they had a big influence on me. But then, obviously, being artists, we need social media to promote ourselves, so we had to come back on.

I do see it a bit differently, now, having been away so long. Of course I see the negative aspects, but I also think it’s a blessing that artists have a way to promote ourselves without necessarily having to go through a big corporate publication. You just have to find a way to not let it rule your life, and sorta treat it like it’s your own magazine of sorts. I really do wish they’d do away with the algorithmic feeds and just let people see posts from people they follow chronologically. I hate the feeling that there’s an AI between you and what you see determining what you see. I feel like that’s a big cause for a lot of the larger societal issues we’ve been seeing over the last few years. The “echo chambers.”

I guess, to really answer your question, where “Rocket” comes in is that it’s about being sick of reading everyone’s opinions on every issue of the day and just wanting to be in a more carnal and pure state of energy where you can dance or just enjoy yourself. Language is amazing, but there are so many ways that people misunderstand each other these days because of these echo chambers. But if you transcend that and just look someone in the eyes and focus on how that feels rather than the language, you come to a deeper understanding of the human in front of you and the world around you.

You left New York since the last album. You’ve lived in Zurich. How has being there grounded you for this next phase of the band?

Yes, we did leave for the time being, but we’re actually living in a small town called Konstanz in Germany, which is right on the Swiss border and about 45 minutes from Zürich. It’s where Patti grew up and where most of her family still lives. A really beautiful medieval town with Roman ruins and buildings from the 1100s right on this massive lake with views of the northern Alps on the southern side of the lake.

We love New York and spent 14 years there, and in many ways, it will always be our adult “home” because that’s where Patti and I became adults together and where, basically, the whole St. Lucia story happened. But having two kids in NYC is a verrrry different experience from being a child-free couple enjoying the nightlife and going to yoga every day. We just felt like we needed a change and, honestly, wanted to give ourselves and our kids a higher quality of life. So it’s truly been great from that standpoint. We’ve had very few of the distractions that we had in NYC, and so we’ve been able to focus on our work and our family life, and build this really big body of work that I’m not sure we would’ve been able to do with all the pressures that exist in NYC.

As much as we love NYC, we just felt like it was time for us to turn inwards a bit and go a bit deeper, and sometimes it’s hard to do that living in NYC because there’s always something going on, pulling you away from your work. Being a parent already does that to such a huge degree that we don’t have time or space for the place that we’re living in to do that, too. But we tend to get itchy feet quite quickly so I’m not sure how long it’s gonna last. We were just in South Africa for five weeks visiting my parents, and a big part of us is tempted to move back there for a while. We’ll see.