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Why everyone’s still talking about Wet Leg
How Wet Leg defied the second album curse, sabotage and hype to come back even louder
Rhian Teasdale is grinning down the camera, sporting pimped up boxing gloves, armpit hair, and bleached eyebrows. “You should be careful, do you catch my drift? ’Cause what I really want to know is can you catch these fists?” she challenges on Wet Leg’s big return single ‘catch these fists’. It’s a left turn from the group’s Wicker Man-meets-Cottage Core aesthetic of their debut album era. It’s also a raging “F You” to the people who said they wouldn’t be back.
Their story has all the elements of a perfectly timed joke: timing, an element of surprise, and perfect delivery. “Maybe we could start a band as some kinda joke,” Teasdale trills on the closing track of moisturizer, the band’s defiant second album. It’s a nod to the fact that Wet Leg did indeed start out as a bit of a laugh. But despite – or perhaps because of – that, they’ve become one of the most serious bands in the UK when it comes to both creative punch and commercial success.
But with great hype comes great British scepticism – especially if you happen to be a woman. The moment they blew up, so did the conspiracies. The ‘industry plant’ brigade donned their tin-foil hats, convinced no band could possibly go viral overnight without secret label connections or crafty nepotism. Never mind that Teasdale and co-founder Hester Chambers had been grafting for years before Wet Leg crystallised. The band rightly brushed it off as misogyny and focused on continuing their ascent.
The truth is, a mere year after forming the band (as legend goes, mid-air on a ferris wheel), Teasdale and Hester Chambers had signed to iconic indie label Domino Records. It was 2020 and without being too melodramatic, we were miserable: fed up with lockdowns, worried about the future, and questioning whether live music would ever exist in the same way again. Luckily, unbeknownst to us, Wet Leg were cooking. In June 2021, the band dropped their debut single ‘Chaise Longue’ to coincide with our first summer of freedom since the pandemic began. It was a deliciously silly three minutes that represented the kind of hysteria we all had from being locked up and undersocialised, becoming strangely fond of household objects otherwise unnoticed, quoting lines from random films (in this case Mean Girls, admittedly iconic), and littering sexual innuendo in lieu of human touch.
Then came something even stranger. In 2022, Teasdale’s former partner published an odd smear piece in The Times, claiming credit for their songs and saying that he ought to get his dues. Common sense prevailed, and the collective reaction was one of support for Wet Leg and confusion as to why revealing yourself as the inspiration for a song called ‘Piece Of Shit’ would be any kind of flex.
Rather than feeling self-conscious about the sceptics and adjusting accordingly, Wet Leg have doubled down on their formula. Forget clichéd second albums about how hard it is to be famous and adjusting to LA, the band have remained authentically nonsensical, and even the US are pricking up their ears with Tiny Desk and The Tonight Show performances racking up millions of views. As for moisturizer, the critics’ reviews are in and it’s unanimously positive. Pair that with an almost sold-out tour this autumn and a massive performance at Glastonbury under their belt, and it’s clear Wet Leg have shattered any notion of being a ‘one and done’ band.
‘catch these fists’ ended up being a red herring for an album that’s actually in large parts gushy and romantic, but à la Wet Leg. That means devotions smuggled into ‘davina mccall’ appreciation lyrics and references to cult queer horror film Jennifer’s Body. Meanwhile, the album artwork is equally delightfully weird, with Teasdale smiling uncannily down the lens as Chambers faces the corner, both sporting monstrous spiky talons.
British indie eccentricity never really goes out of style – and Wet Leg have turned in-jokes, surrealism, and innuendo into something that’s not only catchy but genuinely culturally vital. Forget second-album slumps and flash-in-the-pan fame. The real punchline is that the band nobody saw coming are still here, still weird, and still laughing.
Photo by Joseph Okpako/WireImage
