The two women in conservative blue bathing suits the other evening at the Russian & Turkish Baths, at 268 East Tenth Street, were the singer Rachael Price and the bassist Bridget Kearney, of the band Lake Street Dive. Lake Street Dive formed in Boston, in 2004, when its members, including the guitarist Mike (McDuck) Olson and the drummer Mike Calabrese, were students at the New England Conservatory of Music. At first, Lake Street Dive was a jazz band, but its repertoire now also has elements of pop and rhythm and blues. Its arrangements are succinct and refined, and its sound is both spare, since there are only three instrumentalists, and lavish, since they all sing various parts. Price and Kearney, who live in Ditmas Park, decided to visit the baths as a reward for having nearly finished a tour.

At the baths, a small, trim man named Sasha, who had a round face and wore red shorts, asked which treatments the women wanted: mud, salt, or platza. From the baths’ Web site: “Lie down while in the Russian Room and a platza specialist will scrub you (actually beat you) with a broom made of fresh oak leaves, sopping with olive oil soap.” They chose platza. “Good. Will open your pores,” Sasha said. “We do it in a room downstairs, where it’s two hundred degrees.” Kearney asked, “Is that safe?,” and Sasha said, “Sure, it’s safe.”

The women followed Sasha down a set of stairs to the baths, where the light was murky and you couldn’t see the details of anyone’s face unless you were quite close. In the Russian Room, there were two tiers of benches. Price lay face down on the upper one, with her arms against her sides, and Kearney lay with her head at Price’s feet. Sasha placed towels over Kearney’s back, and another attendant placed towels over Price’s. From a well in the center of the room, the attendant filled a bucket with cold water, then emptied it over Price, who hadn’t known to expect it and shouted. With big bunches of dripping oak branches, the men began drumming on the women. “It’s like going through a car wash,” Price said.

The men put down the oak branches and climbed onto the women’s backs, where they crawled up and down on their hands and knees. They picked up the branches and drummed on the women again. Several times, the women were doused with cold water, and each time it seemed like a complete surprise. Price’s attendant had her stand, then he took her hand and led her down the steps in a solicitous way, as if she were arriving at a ball. Outside the Russian Room, he placed her under a cold shower, and turned her several times by the shoulders. Then he draped towels over her head in the style of a babushka. Sasha led Kearney to a small pool, where the water was forty-six degrees. When she came out, she said, “I’m never doing that again.”

For a while, the women sat in another sauna, then in an aromatic steam room, where the air smelled spicy. They then put on dark robes, like ones a monk would wear, and climbed the stairs to the roof, where they sat while the heat slowly drained from their bodies.

Price talked about a journal she’d recently recovered, from when she was fifteen. “I was visiting my aunt in Nashville, where I grew up,” she said. “She told me, ‘I have an old journal of yours.’ I said, ‘I hope it doesn’t have anything embarrassing,’ and she said, ‘Oh, yeah, it does’—so she’d been reading it. When I opened it, I didn’t remember my handwriting. I thought it must be someone else’s. I recognized my voice, though. I’ve been reading it on this tour. It’s very repetitive, and I used a lot of old-fashioned terms, like ‘da bomb.’ ”

“We have to bring that back,” Kearney said.

“We do,” Price said. Then, of the journal, “There’s poetry in it, which is horrible, written in a sort of slam style. Also, I’m always telling myself that I’m fat, and that different friends hate me. What’s strange is that many of them I’m still good friends with. The surprising thing is there are so many people I don’t remember. There was this big fiasco with a guy named Jameson. He liked a friend of mine, and then they broke up, and he liked me, but then he called me fat. Apparently, I dissed him somewhere in front of a lot of people, then I wrote, ‘Oh, Jameson, I hope I completely forget about you someday.’ And I did.” ♦