Every so often, something entirely new can stir a faint and familiar feeling. I ‘get it’ tout de suite. Listening to the rococo sound of Oracle Sisters, I’m suddenly on a nostalgia trip, headed elsewhere: wandering home after a Lisbon Fado set, blinking under the red lights of a Paris discotheque, stepping off a sun-warmed train into dusk, waking up at home in New York.
This mentation of flickering memories jumps with urgency, a reel of half-forgotten scenes, usurped by the present and stitched together by sound. It’s a kind of auditory time travel — and perhaps no accident, given the spectral promise inherent in the band’s name. That quasi-mystical quality courses through their story, from their serendipitous formation to their restlessly itinerant recording process.
The group was born from movement: between city grit and coastal quiet, California and Greece, Kentucky and Glasgow. Their music videos, too, traffic in dream logic — graveyards, gardens, green woodlands. Even its members form a cultural mosaic: Lewis Lazar, American and Danish; Julia Johansen, Finnish; and Chris Willatt, Northern Irish.
Lewis and Chris met during their shared upbringing in Brussels, where they orbited each other in ‘rivaling’ bands. “Being as it was a crossroads for touring bands on the way from the UK or passing from France to Holland, we were lucky to see most bands and artists passing through,” Lewis said. “Small countries have the benefit of not taking themselves too seriously and all the while no one is expected to be too ambitious… We were left to do our own thing.”
By 16, the two were writing songs together — even after Lewis moved to New York and Chris settled in Edinburgh. They would meet up annually to write, the collaboration suspended in a limbo of liminality, until they both found themselves, and their musical zenith, in Paris in 2017, recalibrated and ready.
What followed had the texture of alchemy. After a year working at the cabaret Le Carrousel, near the Moulin Rouge, an explosively creative and cataclysmic confrontation hit when Lewis and Chris met Julia, who had just returned from several years of traveling and was preparing for a film role. Raised outside Helsinki on jazz and classical music, courtesy of her father, she joined a heavy metal band in secondary school — a tonal contrast to her current sound, but one that sharpened her music instincts and helped her weather Scandinavia’s long and dark winters.
Meeting Lewis and Chris, she said, “was a bit of a dream come true,” adding that their music “represents our journey together as well as our individual adventures.” The three quickly discovered a vocal chemistry and Julia’s savoir faire behind the drum kit. By then, Lewis and Chris had written some 60 songs, many of which would anchor the band’s early discography.
“Before Julia joined, Chris and I were just two guys obsessed with writing songs, but very much not a band,” Lewis said. “We played one show before [she] joined and it just didn’t have a vibe that translated. When she [did], it turned into something extra.”
Julia approached the new dynamic with care. “It took some time for me to really adapt and psychologically understand how I fit in,” she said. “I was a shapeshifter for a while.” I still am a bit, but I think I’m quite flexible.” That flexibility became a humming engine. “Her adaptability is what makes a lot of things work,” Lewis said. “She can jump between instruments and our writing has evolved in a cool way, now we all write together. The results have been really cool. So, yeah, it works.”
The band’s trajectory has since unfolded in chapters. Early EPs “Paris I” and “Paris II” set the stage for their 2023 debut album “Hydranism,” recorded in an old house on a Greek island. Their sophomore — and self-produced — release, “Divinations” (2025), came together in a French countryside cabin. On both occasions, the tightly-knit trio lived and worked side by side, moving between studio and kitchen as songs emerged from a shared rhythm.
“When you’re in a band, you have this thing where it can allow you to dream of songs and how they’ll be interpreted by the people you’re in the band with, how they can elevate them, and what they’ll take home with them,” said Chris.
Asked whether their songwriting reflects the moment they’re in or one they long for, the band agreed it hovers between the two. “I guess you would write more of an aspirational song about where you want to be if you didn’t like where you were,” Lewis said. “[If] you’re in the winter but you’re thinking of summer and you can sense it coming, [or if] you can sense something else around the corner.”
Some tracks have assumed totemic significance. “Asc. Scorpio,” inspired by a scorpion sting Lewis endured in Jamaica, has reached nearly 70 million streams on Spotify. “High Moon,” rooted in Julia’s time in South America, captures another brush with transformation — less life-threatening, more life-altering.
In early 2024, the band launched their own label, Wizard Artists, a ensuring creative control. “We’re still in charge of our own ship, in a way, having our own label and choosing who we get to work with,” Lewis said. “We’ve been really careful about how we engage, what we sign, and who we engage with. So, for that reason, I think it keeps the music-making quite pure, actually.”
Their following has grown steadily — venues doubling, even tripling in size — with streaming success and a loyal audience. Yet their lyrics remain personal, even diaristic. “The local can become universal,” Lewis said. “You can talk about something very specific to yourself, but because you’re being so honest about it, it can appeal to everyone.”
Now on a global tour, their offstage rhythms are as idiosyncratic as their sound. Lewis and Chris both run while on the road — although it’s joked that Chris runs only to the bar. “That’s my Irish blood,” he said. Julia, meanwhile, often dials the volume down entirely. “I have this period I just like silence for a while,” she said. “But then I find myself into quite a lot of quiet, soothing, instrumental stuff as well.” Lately: Bernardo and Lover Man.
Their listening habits echo their creative ones: equal parts curiosity and conviction. Lewis toggles between new releases and archival deep dives into Neil Young and The Beatles. “You come across things that have been around for years but you’ve never, never heard before,” he said. “That’s kind of fun. I do quite love to try and discover new stuff, but it can be hard to find something you really connect with.” Sounds apropos to the feeling I was taffy-pulling earlier.
Julia put it simply: “The music we make feels like it makes itself comfortable anywhere we go. It fits in the past, present, and future.”
For now, Oracle Sisters continue to soundtrack the daydreams and moments we don’t know we’re remembering — spinning time into melody, and memory into myth.
