Wet Leg began as an in-joke. Going viral taught them a lesson

The Age

2 days ago

On a breezy May night in London, 5000 people are crammed shoulder-to-shoulder on the famous sloped floor of Brixton Academy. Artificial fog wafts onto the stage and a flood of bright orange lights jolt to life, casting Rhian Teasdale, frontperson and guitarist of the rock band Wet Leg, into silhouette. She stalks towards the microphone, fists raised, as if balancing an invisible barbell above her head, or about to claim a wrestling belt. Her bandmates – Hester Chambers on guitar, drummer Henry Holmes, Joshua Mobaraki on synth and guitars and bassist Ellis Durand – are all in white. Teasdale could just as easily be leading an army or a cult.
It's the band's first London show after a debut outing that kicked off in 2021 and sounds like a relic from a time in music history: a song, written on a lark, based on an in-joke, struck such a nerve that it spawned a record deal, a follow-up single that went just as viral, a global tour supporting Harry Styles and spots on every festival that matters. There was the full-length record and then multiple Grammy awards in 2023.
Where most artists might feel the pressure to do it all over again, Wet Leg have been figuring out how to do it differently.
Their green-ness at the beginning made them agreeable and malleable, Teasdale says the following day over coffee in a Brixton cafe. She's hurried to meet me and Mobaraki after a nail appointment and before a soundcheck – there's another show at the venue tonight to prepare for.
'The last album … [we were] just being a bit naive, letting people project their own ideas of what it is to be Wet Leg, what it is to be, like, this off-kilter kind of cottagecore duo.'
That duo was, for many years, Teasdale and Chambers. College friends who met on the sleepy Isle of Wight, a place that I know little of besides lyrics from When I'm Sixty-Four and Teasdale's recollection of wanting so badly to leave and move to London, where she now lives with her partner. The offbeat, post-punk style of their music and unserious, eye-rolling lyrics came as a shock to listeners, who hung on their every whispered word. Its popularity was just as shocking to the band members themselves, who never thought anyone would be listening.
' Wet Dream and Chaise Longue – they were stupid songs that we started writing in mine and Hester's flat,' Mobaraki says. Mobaraki, Chambers' long-term partner, witnessed the band's origins when Teasdale was back on the Isle of Wight, crashing on their couch for a weeks-long stretch. 'We were having such a good time making ourselves laugh. It just sort of happened.
'Maybe this is quite a romantic way to think about it, but what's special about Hester and Rhian is that those things they find funny or special happen to resonate with lots of people,' he says, grinning in disbelief at where he and his friends have found themselves. 'It's so cool. I still can't believe it.'
Lots of people connecting and paying attention can be a blessing and a curse, though. Chambers soldiered through her social anxiety to promote their first record and tours but has made the call not to do the same this time around. Her speaking voice in interviews is tiny and nervous – a contrast to the strength she unleashes on her guitar – and on stage she'll often turn her back to the audience. In photoshoots, she's become a pro at hiding behind props and her long hair. In shared interviews, she and Teasdale often held eye contact with one another as if a silent, encouraging telekinetic thread was running between them.
They were branded as waifish little oddballs, rather than friends keeping each other as solid as possible. Being sweetly dressed, softly spoken young women and entirely new to the industry meant being misrepresented, and they often paid an emotional price. 'There have been occasions with the first album that people have kind of infantalised me and Hester, and kind of separated us from the boys,' Teasdale says.
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It's one reason why the rules have shifted this time around, and she and her bandmates feel empowered enough to enforce them. 'We are learning to say no to things, and we can say no to things.
'If there's a weird comment on the internet – whilst I'm not trying to give these often quite mad people the time of day, sometimes I think it is important to call it out because … I think for us, having an online presence just happened so quickly and so it's not really something that we really thought about happening when we started the band and being that available for people to cast their opinions and desires upon us.'
Give people an inch and they'll take a mile. Or, to be more specific: give men online a new band fronted by pretty young women to bear witness to, and they'll stake a claim and make those women responsible for their slobbering impulses.
One of their breakout singles might've been called Wet Dream, but the sing-song delivery of the incendiary line 'What makes you think you're good enough to think about me when you're touching yourself?' was a piercing safety pin deflating any masturbatory fantasies. Nevertheless, they persist.
'It happened the other day: some dude had commented on one of our videos, 'A lot of boys have become men today'.' I'm like, that's so f---ing gross. That's so f---ing weird,' Teasdale says.
Sitting in her kitchen chatting to me over Zoom on what promises to be a sweltering London morning a few weeks after the Brixton shows, wearing a white tank top similar to the ones she's worn in Moisturizer 's press photos, album cover and videos, Teasdale mimes a shiver down her spine.
'It was such a strange time and we were just trying to make sense of it all, to work out what our boundaries are.'
Rhian Teasdale
'Most of the time I do just ignore it 'cause I don't want to give it any more energy, because it really doesn't warrant that. But I actually commented back and I said, 'Ew, creepy'. And then I checked back and the guy deleted his post entirely. I think people just think that … we are complacent and we're not going to say anything.'
Saying yes, nodding along, smiling through the discomfort taught Teasdale that no one wins when she doesn't listen to her gut. So she's turned the volume up on it now, palatability be damned. The cover of Moisturizer shows her crouched on the carpet of a drab suburban bedroom, grinning menacingly. She and Chambers have long, sharp talons that are more pre-historic than glamorous. It's peculiar and leaves an uneasy taste in your mouth. That's entirely the point.
'The more people you get involved, the more diluted the vision becomes, and the more weird iterations you get of what it is that you're setting out to do. It's just been really empowering, being able to have that much autonomy over [our] image. And to build a world around the music and be a bit fake or a bit subversive with it.'
Despite occasionally dipping their toes in the discourse and reacting to what they witness there, Wet Leg are by and large revelling in more romantic impulses these days. Rhian met her partner, also a musician, around the same time the band began to gain attention. Chambers and Mobaraki are at their most content when they're at home on the Isle of Wight, going about life by each other's sides. Moisturizer is, more than anything, a totem to intimacy. On album opener CPR, Teasdale mimics a call to emergency services. The crisis? 'Well… the thing is… I… I… I… I… I… I'M IN LOVE'. There's sentimental mooning and rose-tinted dreams of romantic getaways on some tracks, and then there's Pillow Talk, a promise to make her lover sticky, hot, screaming, beg, and 'wet like an aquarium'.
After they finally arrived at the end of what felt like endless touring, the band weren't reunited again until they set up a makeshift studio in the seaside town of Suffolk. The idea of hunkering down to make Moisturizer in one fell swoop – rather than tinkering away at singles in stolen moments – appealed to Teasdale.
'It was just like, 'No, I don't want to be sat in the second-album world forever, let's just get it over with'.' The risk of letting in outside pressures and voices, of agonising over whether songs would connect, if people would like them, was too great otherwise. 'We did the old-school rock'n'roll residency. Let's just go and block the world out there and be very self-indulgent about it.'
What came out during that time together were songs that dream of exiling someone who's been standing in your light (Mangetout) and a love story dedicated to a person whose presence makes you believe in divine forces (Pond Song). There were songs inspired by the horror movies the band watched together each night (Jennifer's Body) and more than one reference to winding back and planting a sharp uppercut on someone. It's a record with teeth and hard edges, that snarls and snaps. But also one with a fleshy underbelly, a deep delicacy and a vulnerability we weren't permitted to see on Wet Leg's cheeky debut outing.
As they ready themselves for another year in which chaos and upheaval are the new standard, I mention that it's unusual for an artist to do what Chambers has done, in excusing herself from the conversation she was a key player in a few years ago. Teasdale nods in agreement, until I suggest their entree into fame involved her looking after her bandmate.
'Hester doesn't need looking after,' she asserts. 'It was just such a strange time, and we were both just trying to make sense of it all, both trying to each work out what our boundaries are. And I think we're both very protective of each other.'
'You have to try things to know whether you get on with them,' Mobaraki says simply, of his girlfriend's move out of the spotlight. 'You have to be out of your comfort zone to know that you're out of your comfort zone. When you want to be in a band when you're young, you don't actually think about, 'Oh yeah, and how would I react to feeling observed by 5000 people while I do my thing?''
Put that way, the rock-star fantasy begins to fray a little at the seams.
Teasdale insists the band is 'really happy and settled', and finds the suggestion that they are otherwise to be a distraction. 'It's really funny to see people on the internet pulling their hair out. 'Where's Hester? Where's Hester?' It's like, chill out. It's people like you that probably make her want to retreat. So grabby.'