When I speak to Juliet Harding, lead vocalist of GoodLuck, she’s driving. It’s fitting. In many ways, Harding has spent the past year and a half in motion.
Since releasing their last original single in April last year, the Cape Town dance music group have been on hiatus. Last Deep Breath ends an intentional pause that saw the band step away from the relentless cycle of releases and, in Harding’s case, navigate one of life’s biggest transformations. Becoming a mother. “Anyone who’s had a baby knows what I’m talking about when I say it changes everything,” Harding says. Becoming a parent, she explains, prompted a period of profound introspection. “It’s been an amazing opportunity to actually look inward… what I like about myself, what I really want to change, why I’m here on this planet.”
That transformation sits at the heart of Last Deep Breath. Wrapped in nostalgic ’90s house textures and GoodLuck’s unmistakable knack for euphoric songwriting, the single is ultimately about choosing presence over anxiety. It’s all very Ray Of Light coded.
I bring up some of the single’s lyrics, “We are light, and to light we will return.” Harding immediately… lights up. “It’s actually my favourite lyric from the song,” she tells me. For her, the words are a reminder to live with intention and compassion. “It’s remembering that you are from light, and you will return to light. So your job here is to bring light—however that looks for you. We all forget that because we’re busy and stressed and working too hard. We’re stuck up in our heads.”
Harding gets bubbly when I describe Last Deep Breath as a more somatic approach to dance music for GoodLuck. “No, it’s so cool that you brought up that word,” she says. “We’ve kind of gotten back into our bodies.” She explains that she and her bandmate and producer Ben Peters have spent the last two years reconnecting with the reasons why they love making music, a process that’s involved learning to create from a more instinctive place. And maybe some therapy, too. As Harding speaks about this process, I get the sense that Last Deep Breath is more of a reset than a comeback single. “When you’ve been absent for that long,” Harding tells me, “you kind of have to come back with a bang.” And right now for GoodLuck, that bang doesn’t mean chasing a chart topping hit. It’s about making music that sparks real joy.
Harding speaks candidly about the pressure artists face to chase streaming numbers and commercial success, admitting how it gradually made releasing music more daunting than inspiring. “I don’t have any expectations of this song,” she says, almost matter-of-factly. “We’ve done our bit. We’ve crafted it until it feels genuine and like a real representation of what we’re trying to say. Now we give it to the world.” Then she laughs. “I don’t care anymore… I just want to have fun.” So last Last Deep Breath is a reset, indeed. GoodLuck has come back with something arguably more rare than a hit. They’ve made a song from a place of creative freedom. “We’ve had to reconnect with our love of creating music and bringing it to people in a genuine way,” she says. “At the core of it, we’re here to bring joy and make people feel happy and free.”
That freedom, Harding hopes, will define everything that follows. She isn’t interested in promising a particular sound or predicting where this new era of GoodLuck will go next. “I don’t know exactly what it’s going to be like,” she admits. “I just know it’s going to be very honest, and very true to us.”
We’ve had to reconnect with our love of creating music and bringing it to people in a genuine way. At the core of it, we’re here to bring joy and make people feel happy and free. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to be like. I just know it’s going to be very honest, and very true to us.”
Photography by Adam Miemiec.
