Like many, I was thrilled by the overnight emergence of this band in 2021. They had zero on-ramp: no teasers, no captivating social media presence, no backers. Nothing. Suddenly, they hit us with “Chaise Longue” and “Wet Dream.” Nobody had heard of them, this band from the Isle of Wight (like, where?) that seemed a combination of grrrl power (but even funnier), Lou Reed talk-singing (but in a good way), jangle-angle guitars (with melody), and meta-commentary (without pedanticism) that sent much of the indie scene into a kind of frenzy. Let alone the complete takedown of everything that anybody else thought about gender relationships. With but the two songs from my feed, I bought a ticket for their first appearance in San Francisco at the Rickshaw in December 2021.
And. I. Was. Enthralled.
Wet Leg played a roughly one-hour set; it’s all the music they had. Lead singer/guitarist Rhian Teasdale was charismatic, and geeky, and humble, clearly overwhelmed by the fact that we all knew the words. Many of us brought props to deploy, like it was Rocky Horror Picture Show. Guitarist Hester Chambers was enigmatic and mystical in her refusal to do anything but fade into the background (she has pretty bad social anxiety). Ellis Durand (bass) and Henry Holmes (drums) drove the performance exactly as I imagined they would; I was stoked that they seemed to enjoy Teasdale as the front person as much as the rest of us. Joshua Mobaraki (guitar, synth) turned out to be a key component of the overall sound, which surprised me.
The set was spectacular. The band, clearly thrilled being together on stage, engaged in impromptu interactions, laughed at their own flubs, comically learning how to play IRL to adoring fans in a city in which they assumed they were complete unknowns. The set navigated tremendously fraught barricades about gender, politics, on-line life, and IRL with humor, precision, and a clear determination that those lines can be temporarily erased in a one-hour community. I left feeling sooooo much better about bro culture (we can stop it!), anti-feminism (we can stop it!), social media toxicity (we can’t stop it), the state of the US (we can’t stop it alone), and my fear of the end of human relationships (oh wait….the set didn’t help my fears of that). The next day I txted all my fellow music nerdz that when Wet Leg’s full-length came out in April 2022, it was going to change our lives.
Welp…. like most of my musical predictions, I was wrong. Wet Leg’s self-titled first release didn’t change my life. In fact, apart from a handful of gems, it is as inconsistent as the band’s critique of modern life as a twenty something.
When Durand and Holmes are allowed to drive a song, they are thrilling. When Chambers’ arpeggiated guitar licks are allowed to lead a song, we’re in good territory. When Teasdale sticks to her strengths, it’s very good indie-pop-post-punk, with a strong nod to the ’90s. When the biting witticism of their lyrics is a central feature, Wet Leg shimmers. Unfortunately, the band tries too many other musical approaches on this self-released debut, angles that don’t suit them.
The album opens with “Being In Love,” which starts our trip by foregrounding the vibe of much of the album, lyrically: la la la la la, I don’t know what love is, I only know that is “feels like being in love.” It’s an important theme of the album. There’s something utterly not right in the world because we only “feel like” rather than “know.” There’s something that should be emotionally real, but we only feel distance from any of that. It’s an acute observation, which will be revisited throughout the album, but the song is plodding and weirdly musically uninteresting. Can we possibly combine lassitude and distancing that is more interesting than this?
Yeah, of course we can.
The monster indie-hit “Chaise Longue” follows. The first few bars are so infectious they need a vaccine. The song is nothing without the bass/drum underpinning which is simple and plain. When Wet Leg gets away from that, in this album, it never works. And the lyrics—filled with double entendres, and non-hateful pokes at all sorts of powers-that-be—is where the band is best:
Mummy, daddy, look at me
I went to school and I got a degree
All my friends call it ‘the big D’
I went to school and I got the big D
I got the big D
Is your muffin buttered?
Would you like us to assign someone to butter your muffin?
Excuse me (what?)
Excuse me (what?)
Hey you, over there
On the chaise longue in your underwear
What are you doing sitting down?
You should be horizontal now
As Teasdale sings these lyrics, no listener believes she is being entirely truthful. But isn’t that everything we do these days? Isn’t irony and distancing from what we’re really wanting to feel and say the whole point?
In “Angelica,” the band reaches out into a broader and lusher production, bringing in synths, both crunching and overlayed jangly guitars, tempo changes that fit well with both lyrics and tonal modulations, and some wonderful take downs of social convention and relationship-building in the Instagram age: 
Angelica, she brought lasagna to the party
I tried my luck at dancing with everybody
Sometimes life gets hard to deal
I like you, you've got sex appeal
But I don't wanna follow you on the 'gram
I don't wanna listen to your band
I don't know why I haven't left yet
Don't want none of this
This is (some of) us. I wanna be like Angelica, I want to be the lasagna person, but if I have to do the ’gram… the song suggests that both Angelica and the singer are pretty messed up to want any of it in the first place.
“I Don’t Wanna Go Out” is the second of unfortunately too many throwaway songs on the album, with the lines:
It used to be so fun
Now everything just feels dumb
I wish I could care
And now I'm almost 28, still getting off my stupid face
A fucking nightmare, I know I should care
Right now, I don’t care
It underscores the lyrical tension in this release, however, between “let’s have serious fun” and “let’s have semi-serious fun,” and “I just don’t know what fun even means.”
“Wet Dream” is one of the only songs we will remember from this album 10 years from now. Bass and drum infection? Check. Sardonic distancing between wanting true connection and current gendered relationships in the porn age? Check. Teasdale at her sing-song best, checking her own beliefs? Check.
I was in your wet dream
Driving in my car
What makes you think you’re good enough
To think about me when you’re touching yourself?
Touching yourself
Touching your, touching yourself
Touching yourself
You climb onto the bonnet
And you’re licking the windscreen
I’ve never seen anything so obscene
It’s enough to make a girl blush
It’s enough, it’s enough to make a girl blush
At Wet Dream’s best, lyrically, we ask ourselves, “wait… who’s the narrator, who’s the dreamer, who’s the bystander, who’s telling the story?” We’re never sure, when Wet Leg are at their best. And that is a very underrated attribute of this band: disturbance of the authorial voice, and here they are disturbing their own, while making a pop song meant for one glorious, listen-in-a-convertible-as-you-speed-down-a-rural-road moment.
In much of the rest of the album, Wet Leg isn’t convincing. “Convincing,” Loving You,” “Oh No,” “Piece Of Shit” and “Supermarket” are as unremarkable musically and lyrically as any songs I’ve ever heard. Yes, they can be different in context at a live performance, which they are, but they are unconvincing explorations that largely marginalize the band’s strengths.
In the last unremarkable half of this release, however, lurk two more intriguing songs, “Ur Mum” and “Too Late Now.”
“Ur Mum” is the song they closed with in December 2021. I hate the mix of “Ur Mum” that I have available to me from 2022. It’s flat. It’s not just that a live version is better, it’s that the band and engineers didn’t realize how it should be put into digital format. Wet Leg saved this song for the end of their set, with Teasdale saying: “There’s not going to be an encore. After this song, my voice is shite.” The song, in live time, said, “we’ve all been kind, we’ve all been sardonic and cutting, we all know that we don’t know how to navigate IRL and that other thing, we don’t know how to navigate ironic distance and caring… so let’s do this. And, ya know, maybe a gigantic scream at the top of our lungs, together, might be better than yoga, mindfulness, txting, ’gramming, ayahuasca, influencers….” The scream from the audience, and the band, lasted more than two minutes. And you know? It was better than all those things that everybody tells me is good for myself.
And, the last song, “Too Late Now”:
Now everything is going wrong
I think I changed my mind again
I’m not sure if this is a song
I don't even know what I'm saying
Everything is going wrong
I think I changed my mind again
I'm not sure if this is the kinda life that I saw my self living
I don't need no dating app
To tell me if I look like crap
To tell me if I'm thin or fat
To tell me, should I shave my rat
I don't need no radio, no MTV, no BBC
I just need a bubble bath to send me on a higher path
I’m gonna drive my car into the sea
I’m gonna drive downtown looking pretty ordinary
Too late now, lost track somehow
I'm like, “Oh my God, this road is pretty harrowing”
Down we go while holding hands
If I fuck this up, I’m taking you down with me
Too late now, lost track somehow
Well, if I fuck this up, I’m taking you down with me
After being entirely underwhelmed by this release….the last song. Which raised my hopes for their next album. Here, the band brings together everything they have been fiddling with on this release. Bass and drums in the foreground. A beautiful guitar track (if you like any guitar riff on this album, Chambers is responsible for it). Making synths work within the wider musical and lyrical intent. Giving Teasdale an opportunity to do a Kae Tempest-like rap lyric. Looking back at the album and declaring there’s some gold there, there’s some shite there, and here’s our plan for the future.
The album is inconsistent, searching in a way that won’t serve it in the long term. Yet…that last song left me wondering: I’m underwhelmed and captivated at the same time. What’s next?
It took them three years to deliver their second album—which I’ll cover in a companion review.