***ALBUM OF THE MONTH | April 2022***
Wet Leg
Wet Leg
Domino
Buy via Official Store | Listen Below
There’s the famous quote by Margaret Atwood, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” And maybe that’s because men know instinctively that for many women, the only way to really survive in a man’s world is to laugh, sometimes in their presence but more frequently among ourselves or just in our own heads.
On their thunderous, cheeky, irreverent and ambitious self-titled debut album, Wet Leg encapsulate this ethos of dry, wry humor as a means of survival, but also for the sake of pure, glorious, unadulterated fun.
The cover of Wet Leg features a photo of the duo, Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers, that was taken right after they had finished performing. “It's a photo of me and Hester, just after we'd come off stage. I've got my arm around her waist, and she's got her arm over my shoulder, and we're hunched over..." Teasdale explains in an accompanying press release, before Chambers finishes the sentence, "Like we're telling each other a secret."
It’s an appropriate image for an album that often feels like a conversation full of inside jokes, and casual-fierce loyalty, between best friends in their 20s. What makes the duo so relatable is no doubt the fact that they’re self-proclaimed “little country bumpkins” (from the Isle of Wight) that have likely, even in the age of social media, still have had to make their own fun. They’re also college dropouts (they each left to pursue their music), and the album reflects a refreshing ‘90s-style slackerdom and lack of pretention that you don’t often encounter anymore in this era of side hustles and personal branding and Instagram influencers. (Still, they chose the name “Wet Leg” because they wanted something they could spell with emojis). There’s a timeless universality to the bawdy, hilarious, and very smart interplay between Teasdale and Chambers.
Of course, not everyone can rock like they do. The enthusiasm for the band has been building since the release of their flirty, dirty, spare-but-wildly melodic first single “Chaise Longue” in 2021, which made fans out of everyone from Florence Welch to Iggy Pop to Dave Grohl. And me.
Full disclosure: I’ve eagerly awaited the release of each new single, and have been excited about this band to the point that I was nervous that the album might not live up to my keenness thus far. But it absolutely does. Wet Leg is overarchingly sassy and punk-rock and lyrically shocking in the vein of many of its singles, but the album in its entirety has the layered depth I was hoping for, rounded out by pop hooks, disco and glam-rock elements, sublimely weird electronic accents, deft guitar, and incredibly beautiful vocals that demonstrate the impressive range of both singers.
The most noticeable thread throughout Wet Leg is that the duo almost always keep things a little bit discordant, never allowing the listener to get wholly comfortable and numb within a hook or a rhythm or a chorus. There’s rarely an instance where they do the done thing, or conform to the expected, and it allows for a rich landscape of emotion.
This can be seen immediately on the opening song “Being In Love,” which begins abruptly, almost in medias res, with an odd meter to the lyrics. The song settles into a wonderful loud-quiet dynamic with segments of spare beats and scratchy distortion juxtaposed against bursts of poppy-yet-grating guitars and sunny harmonies. According to the lyrics—“I need to lay down / Only just got up / I feel so uninspired / I feel like giving up”—being in love isn’t that pleasant of an experience, but the Technicolor, saccharine sonic hook says otherwise.
The second song on the album is the beloved “Chaise Longue,” and it’s still easy to see why it made us all fall in love with Wet Leg at first listen. Over sparse, ticking, timebomb guitar we hear the story of a young woman going to college—“Mommy, 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.” The lyrics immediately bring to mind the sexist notion that women attend university to get their “MRS,” and turns it on its head with the slutty, sex-positive notion that maybe they’re just there to fuck.
Wet Leg then re-create in the lyrics the skeezy, sexist come-on of a male student in the movie Mean Girls, whereby he suggestively asks the new girl in school whether her muffin is buttered. “Would you like for us to assign someone to butter your muffin?” he asks. “Excuse me? What? Excuse me? What?” Wet Leg asks. Then the song explodes into a hyper, dance-y wailer. It’s an incredibly sexy track, but at the same time the detached boredom in the duo’s voices, as well the song’s aggressive walls of sound, keep us at a safe distance and make it clear that no, they absolutely don’t want you to butter their muffin.
“Angelica,” another single, has an alien, otherworldly quality with ethereal, dreamy harmonies amid distorted guitars. The message is again feminist, with Wet Leg’s gaze turned on an ordinary but self-assured woman named Angelica, who happens to be at the same party—“Angelica was on her way to the party / She doesn’t need to wait for anybody (nuh-uh) / Knows exactly what she’s doin’ (I know what I’m doin’) / I watch as she commands the room.”
And then we get a taste of the duo’s signature ennui, the exhaustion that sometimes goes along with going out, as well as performing all the social niceties that are often expected of women (but that anyone with a dose of introversion or social anxiety might understand)—“But I don’t’ want to follow you on the ‘gram / I don’t want to listen to your band / I don’t know why I haven’t left yet / Don’t want none of this.” The message is reflected again on “I Don’t Wanna Go Out,” the following track, which has apt Smiths influences (no one is more introverted than Morrissey) along with a little bit of early Beatles.
“Wet Dream,” the duo’s second single, is probably the most conventional track on the record, and seems almost custom-made for every BBC series starring a strong female lead. It was a smart choice for release after the quirky weirdness of “Chaise Longue,” even though the song starts out with “I was in your wet dream driving in the car” and then describes a dude masturbating on the side of the road. “What makes you think you’re good enough to think about me?” the narrator asks, and then the lyrics alternate between flattery and disgust.
The next song, “Convincing” begins breathy and a little bit lounge-y and then morphs into a sunny, sparkling chorus with a glam-rock, Marc Bolan edge. Meanwhile, “Loving You” contains high, reach-for-the heavens vocals, and gorgeous harmonies between Chambers and Teasdale. Overall, the style is a little bit of The Sundays, a little bit of Cocteau Twins. The vocals are absolutely the star of this song, and it does a great job of showcasing both singers’ range and flexibility.
“Ur Mom” is the single that just dropped in anticipation of Wet Leg’s release this Friday, and it has a fun, irreverent video in the camp, colorful, Polaroid style of all of Wet Leg’s videos (all directed by Teasdale). The song’s title, “Ur Mom,” is very much meant as an insult, and we see a clueless, somewhat douchey dude who still lives with his mom bragging about his band at the corner store as though Wet Leg have nothing better to do than to be groupies. It’s a case of art imitating life.
"We'd played in other bands before, but always with boys, and my experience of that was that boys always know what they want. Playing with Hester was different. We just gave each other so much space," Teasdale said in the album’s press release. Chambers also found the experience liberating. "I liked that it wasn't someone telling me what to do," she said. "I got to use more of my brain power and voice." The song also contains a primal scream—it’s represented so beautifully and viscerally in the video—that we can probably all relate to after years of a pandemic, and now a newly waged, brutal war in the news.
“Too Late Now,” a song that was released as an early single, tackles the prison of female beauty standards, with the video showing Chambers and Teasdale and few male friends walking around a city wearing robes and towels on their heads, seemingly escaped from a spa. They point out a sign that says “Botox” and then walk among the city in a sense of lost confusion. They go to a supermarket and buy their own beauty products, including a cucumber, which they peel on the street and make soothing eye covers out of, and then walk around blinded by the poultices (“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.”)
The theme is replicated in another song, “Supermarket,” which states “I wanna take you to the supermarket / I wanna buy you all the shit you need” followed by “I want to take you back to meet my parents / I want to tell them all about that job you do.” The song pokes fun at all the little “big steps” in a relationship, and how we, especially men, get freaked out by the domesticity in a melodramatic way.
Both songs, as well as much of the album, show how Wet Leg do an excellent job of creating a wild kitschy-ness out of the ordinary, putting a party chorus to a song about grocery shopping and making all of our lives a little more glamorous and a lot less mundane.
Notable Tracks: “Angelica” | “Chaise Lounge” | “Loving You” | “Ur Mom”
BUY Wet Leg via Wet Leg’s Official Store
Note: As an Amazon affiliate partner, Albumism may earn commissions from products purchased via links featured on our site.
LISTEN via Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube: