Wet Leg Wet Leg
The musical landscape has changed dramatically since the advent of the internet. Before the world was secured in our pockets as we walked along through our day, music lovers had to rely on the radio or MTV to discover new music and artist. Often there would be a song to come along from an unestablished artist that was so catchy that it dug itself into the listener’s ears and buried itself there until it became borderline annoying. “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” by Italian dance group Eiffel 65 is a fantastic example of a song that comes out of nowhere to absolutely destroy your world. The ‘novelty song’ has since been replaced by the ‘viral hit.’ A song goes viral when it begins to find an audience through a video uploaded online to social media, where it steadily grows and grows until it has been seen and heard by millions and millions of people on the internet. An artist knows it has a hit on its hands when grandmothers in Poughkeepsie are singing it.
Often the viral hit can be a blessing and a curse for an artist and be difficult for them duplicate the success of it. Lil Nas X comes to mind after the enormous amount of success he had with “Old Town Road.” Lil Nas X could have easily been brushed off as a one-hit wonder, but instead, he has been able to highlight his talents, turning that into a successful career that has garnered 2 Grammy Awards so far. The latest owners of a viral hit that the listening public is clamoring to see what happens next with is the Isle of Wright duo Wet Leg.
Wet Leg became a sensation when the music video for their debut single “Chaise Lounge” was viewed over 3.5 million times on YouTube alone and was used in too-many-to-count Tik Tok videos. The duo consisting of Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chamber released the song in June of 2021 and followed that up with their second single “Wet Dream” in September before heading out a sold-out headlining tour of the U.S. without an album to support.
The waiting for their highly anticipated self-titled debut is over as Wet Leg is out for everyone’s listening pleasure. The humor and sarcasm found on “Chaise Lounge” is sprinkled throughout the record displaying the writing talents of Teasdale. Despite being a first-year release, Wet Leg shows that the band is a tight knit group that flows through the indie rock, post-punk sounds that the album is full of.
It is difficult to listen to Wet Leg and not think that this was an album recorded in a small studio in London in the mid-to-late 90s before a massive earthquake hit the UK reducing the studio to rubble, burying this album for over two decades before the neighborhood went under some gentrification and was discovered during construction. The Breeders, Elastica, Pulp, and the Pixies are just some of the obvious influences that can be heard throughout Wet Leg.
The duo has built an ever-growing fanbase over the last 10 months as they have released several songs from the album over that time including the latest single “Ur Mum.” Rhian sings about a relationship that had gone sour and how she was the first to notice that her partner wasn’t bringing anything to the table. Teasdale begs her heartbroken ex to listen to her sing, “I don’t want you to want me, I need you to forget me.”
Listeners may be a bit confused when listening to the mellower “I Don’t Wanna Go Out.” There is an undeniably recognizable guitar riff in the song that many might believe to belong to Nirvana. The riff is instead from David Bowie’s “The Man Who Stole the World” that Kurt Cobain and company covered on the MTV Unplugged album. The song finds the band singing about wanting to get out of adulting because life is too hard. Rhian takes a very melancholy look at life singing “And now I’m almost twenty-eight, still getting off my stupid face” and then becomes very bleak singing “But it never really turns out right, at least we are all going to die.”
Lead singles “Chaise Lounge” and “Wet Dream” showed the sillier side of Wet Leg, questioning how versatile the band could be but the album as whole shows that there is more to Wet Leg than a catchy song featuring a Mean Girls reference. The final track on the album “Too Late Now” is a slow-build that absolutely delivers. The spacey track keeps building until it crescendos with crashing drums and draws the records themes together in a nice little bow. The finale is about coming to a point in life where sometimes it is just pointless to look back and focus on the past that you cannot change and not relying on strangers for your self-worth. If you are struggling with decisions in your life, just take the advice Rhian sings in “Too Late Now,” “Everything is going wrong, I think I changed my mind again, I just need a bubble bath to set me on a higher path.” @wetlegband
Check out some of the other great releases out this week:
- Camilia Cabello Familia
- Vince Staples Ramona Spark Broke My Heart
- Orville Peck Bronco
- The Linda Lindas Growing Up
- Jack White Fear of the Dawn
- Father John Misty Chloe and the Next 20th Century
Steven McCash is the Lead Music Writer and Utility Man for SoBros Network. Steven is the host of the ‘Drinking With…’ podcast, and the pioneer of New Music Friday, highlighting each week’s new releases in the world of music in addition to the occasional live show review. He also pitches in as a Nashville lifestyle writer and football analyst (hence the ‘Utility Man’ title). Follow on Twitter: @MC_Cash75
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