Label: Domino Recordings
Released: 8th April 2022
There’s nothing as exciting as potential. It’s a refrain you’ll find repeated often around these parts, but Wet Leg are the proof in pop’s plentiful pudding. When the Isle of Wight duo first burst through with debut single ‘Chaise Longue’, it was impossible not to go a little OTT. And if there’s ridiculousness going around, you can bet Dork will be head of the queue. Instantly crowning them The Most Exciting New Band on The Planet after twenty-four pre-release hours where they remained on solid loop in ‘ver bunker’, can anyone really say we were wrong?
Still, it’s easy to make an impact with one whipsmart, saucy banger. To do so over a whole record is something else entirely. As each new track from their self-titled debut emerged, any suggestion Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers were the owners of one impressive but lonely trick pony soon flew out the window. Quite how far it’s been flung, though, is something only their first full-length statement can prove. It’s definitely gone way past Portsmouth, put it that way.
Opener ‘Being In Love’ proves that, even when dealing with the more traditional topics, Wet Leg still feel a little weird and wonderful. Confirmation that what we all needed was a little bit of odd, Rhian’s razor-sharp tongue remains the star of the show. Never more than a quick hop, skip and jump from another brilliantly delivered, eminently quotable line, Wet Leg manage to take the bits of indie and alt-rock still fit for purpose and forge them into a cultish, ramshackle chaos engine. From the Pavement slacker charm of ‘Supermarket’ to the electric scream of ‘Ur Mum’, that nagging worry that they were just too strange to ever be really massive is condemned firmly to the scrapheap of bad takes. Believe the hype – Wet Leg really are everything we said they were.
