Wet Leg Wet Leg LP

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After releasing two of the hottest singles of the year (“Chaise Longue” & “Wet Dream”), Wet Leg’s Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers were catapulted from their confines on the Isle of Wight to sold-out venues and packed-out tents at festivals causinggiddy excitement wherever they went. Their debut album is called Wet Leg.

In the middle of 2021, Wet Leg’s Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers came seemingly out of nowhere and dominated popular culture, or at least a part of it, with their single ‘Chaise Lounge.’ Its combination of in-jokes, Mean Girls quotes, fancy furniture, and warm beer – all served up with deadpan irony, nagging guitars, and shout-along choruses – sounded like instant summer. Somehow, the music Wet Leg wanted to make also happened to be what everyone else wanted to hear; ‘Chaise Lounge’ racked up millions of streams and reached number 27 on the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart, no small feat for a previously unknown act. It’s rare that a band is so fully formed at the start of their career, but on their self-titled debut album, Wet Leg deliver more of those immediately memorable hooks and relatable, witty retorts. Unlike many of their post-punk influenced contemporaries, Teasdale and Chambers laugh at the world’s absurdity (and their own) instead of despairing at it. That sense of humor is a powerful weapon in their hands, and they’re most confident on Wet Leg when they’re taking aim… Wet Leg more than delivers on the promise of their viral beginnings.

Wet Leg have hooks stuffed with bait – and beyond convincingly consolidating past eras of guitar pop, they ply an idiosyncratic line in wild-eyed choruses that unspool in run-on bursts of mania, building to terminal velocity, tripping on internal rhymes,and dragging you down with them.

On top of their lyrical prowess, Wet Leg has created an instrumental foundation of indie rock: steady drums, fuzzed-out rhythm guitar and vivid lead guitar, and creative baselines. Wet Leg has all of the biting wit and hostile coolness of a veteran indie album; the band’s fresh point of view keeps us excited for what’s next.

Songs that tap into several generations’ worth of rock and post-punk influences while still capturing a cocktail of moods that’s unmistakably of-the-moment: somehow both over- and under-stimulated, introspective but distant, lusty but numb.

They do angular indie rock with precise, metronomic vocals on ‘Angelica,’ there’s a dance-y beat pushing a bright melody on ‘Ur Mom’ as buzzsaw guitars come and go, and ‘Supermarket’ winds around on shambling guitars and loose-limbed backing vocals, like some slacker-rock anthem from people who aren’t really slackers at all.