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The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Wet Leg: Moisturizer review – Doritos, Davina McCall and dumb fun from British indie's big breakout band
Moisturizer concludes with a track called U and Me at Home. In it, Rhian Teasdale sings about the pleasures of doing nothing over guitars that bend in and out of tune in the style patented by My Bloody Valentine. Nothing much happens in the song – there's some discussion about possibly getting a takeaway, and a brief nod to the 'happy comatose' effects of weed – but it does feature a few lines that function as a kind of Wet Leg origin story. 'Maybe we could start a band as some kind of joke,' sings Teasdale. 'Well, that didn't quite go to plan … now we've been stretched across the world'. You don't need to be a member of Wet Leg and aware of the circumstances of their formation – apparently the result of a conversation between Teasdale and guitarist Hester Chambers while on a ferris wheel – to feel slightly surprised at their continued success and how hotly anticipated their second album has turned out to be. Their breakthrough debut single Chaise Longue was a great song, but it carried a hint of the left-field novelty hit, the kind of funny-weird track that temporarily ignites indie disco dancefloors and festival audiences before it and its authors recede swiftly into memory: the latest addition to a pantheon that includes Electric Six's Gay Bar, Liam Lynch's United States of Whatever, and – one for readers of a certain age – the Sultans of Ping's Where's Me Jumper? But that wasn't what happened at all. Wet Leg's eponymous debut album turned out to be stuffed with both hooks of a kind you don't really get in British alt-rock these days and witty, sharply-drawn vignettes of life among the provincial hipsters of the Isle of Wight – Wet Dream, which turned into an even bigger hit than Chaise Longue, cast a weary eye over a Vincent Gallo-obsessed letch. The album went gold in the UK, made the US Top 20 and won two Brits and two of the three Grammys it was nominated for. Something that was a 'kind of joke' has ended up a remarkably big deal: at one juncture, Teasdale and Chambers became so weary of inquiries as to when their second album was coming out, they took to telling interviewers it was already finished, when they hadn't started work on it. That said, Moisturizer does not seem much like the work of a band nervous about following up an unexpectedly huge debut. It's a very confident record indeed, from the leering grin Teasdale sports on its cover, to the big, knowingly dumb garage rock riffs that gust through Catch These Fists and Pillow Talk, to the dramatic shift in its lyrics. The goings-on in Ryde's indie crowd have been supplanted as chief subject matter. 'Hello, 999, what's your emergency / Well, the thing is … I'm in love,' gasps Teasdale on opener CPR, which pretty much sets the album's tone. You hear an awful lot about her blossoming relationship with her partner, and indeed her surprise at the discovery her sexuality was more fluid than she previously thought, the latter expressed in questions sprinkled across the songs: 'Is this fun? Is this a vibe?' 'The fuck am I doing?' 'Am I dreaming?' 'What's a guy like me to do?' It means that the kind of barbed put-downs that peppered their debut are thinner on the ground, although there's a great one on Catch These Fists, a withering dismissal of a would-be suitor in a nightclub: 'He don't get puss, he get the boot / I saw him sipping on Dark Fruit.' And besides, you hardly want for smart, funny lyrics, their power amplified by Teasdale's hugely expressive voice slipping from singing to speech, from careful enunciation to a chewy drawl, from snarl to wide-eyed gasp. Davina McCall channels a rush of lust through the Big Brother presenter's catchphrase 'I'm coming to get you'; Don't Speak frames romance through the unlikely metaphor of tortilla chips: 'You're the sand between my toes … We go together like salsa and Doritos.' Musically, it shifts from Pokemon's synth-y 80s pop rock to the kind of Kate Bush-influenced balladry in which Teasdale dabbled when she was still a singer-songwriter who called herself Babushka Baba Yaga, on 11:21. But its primary currency is early 90s US alt-rock – the ghosts of Pixies, Belly and the Breeders haunt its lurching dynamic shifts and cocktails of sticky pop melodies and raging guitars – and, more unexpectedly, the angular riffs of Elastica, particularly pronounced on Pond Song and Catch These Fists. Indeed, Wet Leg's influences are never far from the surface of their music and you could argue that all this amounts to yet more canny restructuring of the past in a genre that's made recycling its business for the last 30 years. But it's far harder to quibble with the power of the end result. Whatever's inspired them, the songs are supremely punchy, the tunes contagious: Moisturizer is a blast. One suspects that, for Wet Leg, things will continue to not go quite to plan for some time yet. Moisturizer is released via Domino on 11 July
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Wet Leg: Moisturizer review – Doritos, Davina McCall and dumb fun from British indie's big breakout band
Moisturizer concludes with a track called U and Me at Home. In it, Rhian Teasdale sings about the pleasures of doing nothing over guitars that bend in and out of tune in the style patented by My Bloody Valentine. Nothing much happens in the song – there's some discussion about possibly getting a takeaway, and a brief nod to the 'happy comatose' effects of weed – but it does feature a few lines that function as a kind of Wet Leg origin story. 'Maybe we could start a band as some kind of joke,' sings Teasdale. 'Well, that didn't quite go to plan … now we've been stretched across the world'. You don't need to be a member of Wet Leg and aware of the circumstances of their formation – apparently the result of a conversation between Teasdale and guitarist Hester Chambers while on a ferris wheel – to feel slightly surprised at their continued success and how hotly anticipated their second album has turned out to be. Their breakthrough debut single Chaise Longue was a great song, but it carried a hint of the left-field novelty hit, the kind of funny-weird track that temporarily ignites indie disco dancefloors and festival audiences before it and its authors recede swiftly into memory: the latest addition to a pantheon that includes Electric Six's Gay Bar, Liam Lynch's United States of Whatever, and – one for readers of a certain age – the Sultans of Ping's Where's Me Jumper? But that wasn't what happened at all. Wet Leg's eponymous debut album turned out to be stuffed with both hooks of a kind you don't really get in British alt-rock these days and witty, sharply-drawn vignettes of life among the provincial hipsters of the Isle of Wight – Wet Dream, which turned into an even bigger hit than Chaise Longue, cast a weary eye over a Vincent Gallo-obsessed letch. The album went gold in the UK, made the US Top 20 and won two Brits and two of the three Grammys it was nominated for. Something that was a 'kind of joke' has ended up a remarkably big deal: at one juncture, Teasdale and Chambers became so weary of inquiries as to when their second album was coming out, they took to telling interviewers it was already finished, when they hadn't started work on it. That said, Moisturizer does not seem much like the work of a band nervous about following up an unexpectedly huge debut. It's a very confident record indeed, from the leering grin Teasdale sports on its cover, to the big, knowingly dumb garage rock riffs that gust through Catch These Fists and Pillow Talk, to the dramatic shift in its lyrics. The goings-on in Ryde's indie crowd have been supplanted as chief subject matter. 'Hello, 999, what's your emergency / Well, the thing is … I'm in love,' gasps Teasdale on opener CPR, which pretty much sets the album's tone. You hear an awful lot about her blossoming relationship with her partner, and indeed her surprise at the discovery her sexuality was more fluid than she previously thought, the latter expressed in questions sprinkled across the songs: 'Is this fun? Is this a vibe?' 'The fuck am I doing?' 'Am I dreaming?' 'What's a guy like me to do?' It means that the kind of barbed put-downs that peppered their debut are thinner on the ground, although there's a great one on Catch These Fists, a withering dismissal of a would-be suitor in a nightclub: 'He don't get puss, he get the boot / I saw him sipping on Dark Fruit.' And besides, you hardly want for smart, funny lyrics, their power amplified by Teasdale's hugely expressive voice slipping from singing to speech, from careful enunciation to a chewy drawl, from snarl to wide-eyed gasp. Davina McCall channels a rush of lust through the Big Brother presenter's catchphrase 'I'm coming to get you'; Don't Speak frames romance through the unlikely metaphor of tortilla chips: 'You're the sand between my toes … We go together like salsa and Doritos.' Musically, it shifts from Pokemon's synth-y 80s pop rock to the kind of Kate Bush-influenced balladry in which Teasdale dabbled when she was still a singer-songwriter who called herself Babushka Baba Yaga, on 11:21. But its primary currency is early 90s US alt-rock – the ghosts of Pixies, Belly and the Breeders haunt its lurching dynamic shifts and cocktails of sticky pop melodies and raging guitars – and, more unexpectedly, the angular riffs of Elastica, particularly pronounced on Pond Song and Catch These Fists. Indeed, Wet Leg's influences are never far from the surface of their music and you could argue that all this amounts to yet more canny restructuring of the past in a genre that's made recycling its business for the last 30 years. But it's far harder to quibble with the power of the end result. Whatever's inspired them, the songs are supremely punchy, the tunes contagious: Moisturizer is a blast. One suspects that, for Wet Leg, things will continue to not go quite to plan for some time yet. Moisturizer is released via Domino on 11 July
Irish Times
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Jessica Pratt: ‘I'm not in awe of many people's bodies of work in the way I am with Brian Wilson's'
Since she returned from a tour of Australia a fortnight ago, Jessica Pratt hasn't felt quite at home in her body. The California songwriter's shut-eye has been fitful: she sometimes wakes disoriented, and with a sense that things are not as they should be. 'I keep having this thing where I try to go to sleep, and then I'm up until two, three in the morning, and then I sleep until hours that are not my typical style,' she says. Such unusual sensations – the feeling of something dark rising up from a slumber – will be familiar to fans of Pratt's dreamlike confessional pop, particularly her extraordinary fourth album, Here in the Pitch, from 2024. Reverberating with the sort of dark vibrations you might expect to play over a bar scene in Twin Peaks or an especially bleak section of The 2 Johnnies Late Night Lock-in, the record elevated the 38-year-old to the higher echelons of cult indie stardom. READ MORE She has guested, alongside her hero Dan Bejar, of Destroyer , on the comedian John Mulaney's Netflix chatshow and been interviewed by Molly Gordon, the actor best known for the Disney+ series The Bear. And she's touring all over, including at Vicar Street in Dublin this weekend. But if Here in the Pitch has brought her into the light in a career sense, its roots are tangled up in the darkest days of the pandemic: the wild, walls-are-closing-in summer of 2020, when lockdown followed lockdown and people were taking to the streets, whether in support of Black Lives Matter or to spread conspiracy theories about masks and vaccines. It was, to put it mildly, a moment – and Pratt taps into that dark fairytale energy on songs such as Life Is and World on a String. 'I want to be the sunlight of the century,' she sings on the former, a yearning for brighter days fuelled by a trilling voice suggestive of a purgatorial Dusty Springfield, while on By Hook or by Crook she comes on like Loretta Lynn with lyrics by the Brothers Grimm. These are extraordinary songs: phantasmagorical, haunted yet poignant and emotional too. Of our world yet somehow beyond it. LA is a weird place, in that it's kind of windless. It's not blustery at all. There's a weird sort of sound-stage quality, where it can be very still 'You may recall the States in 2020 … There was a lot of civil unrest,' she says, explaining that she initially believed wrapping herself up in songwriting would be trivial, given the condition of the world. As time passed, however, she returned to music, feeling that, in confining circumstances, it was a place where she could be free and spread her wings. 'At the end of 2020 I started writing more and feel grateful for that sort of open space.' Los Angeles is a huge influence on her music. She loves the city for its contradictions: how the City of Angels is also a spiritual home of noir, a land of sunshine where shadows stretch long and heavy. The other contrast, she notes, is that, though LA often has a quality of stillness, it can collapse into terrifying natural violence, as the world saw when wildfire swept southern California earlier this year. 'It feels like the edge of something,' she says. 'There used to be this sort of sense of stasis. The winds that caused those fires was not something that I had ever experienced.' At its worst, it was as if the climate apocalypse had come to her door. 'I remember the night that I was sitting in my house – I was alone. I live in an old, small cavity house,' she says, referring to a house whose walls consist of two layers with a space between. 'The walls are very thin. You would have been very afraid to step outside. There was this vicious wind that was unlike anything I'd ever heard in Los Angeles. LA is a weird place, in that it's kind of windless. It's not blustery at all. There's a weird sort of sound-stage quality, where it can be very still.' [ Oasis kick off reunion tour in Cardiff with triumphant, nostalgic gig Opens in new window ] Pratt recalls how a nearby park was constantly catching ablaze during the wildfire, often as a result of arson. 'The city did what they could. But they were overwhelmed. There were fires everywhere. Fires kept starting in this park – and some of the time it was people setting fires. Just complete bedlam. I guess in the classic sense some people just want to watch the world burn.' She grew up somewhere very different. About 800km north of Los Angeles, Redding is a midsized California city straight out of Norman Rockwell – or, for those allergic to evangelical Christianity, The Handmaid's Tale. As the child of a hippyish mother, Pratt has strong memories of feeling like an outsider in her hometown, of knowing her friends and neighbours would be strangers another day. 'I was raised by a single mom with my older brother, and she was a very intelligent person. Not to say that to be religious is to be not, of course. But she was very worldly in a way, and the fact that we lived in this small town ... 'It was an affordable place to live, and it would not have been her first choice in terms of the identity of the city. Nor did she have any friends there. So we were kind of isolated in a way.' They were not completely cut off from the world around them, but nor could they escape the stifling religiosity. 'I went to school and I had friends. Often their parents would be somewhere on the spectrum of fundamentalist Christianity – this thing that we were aware of, but it didn't necessarily affect us in a deep way beyond encountering it in in various spaces. I'd spend the night at my friend's house or something, and be baptised by someone else's dad without really having any interest in that.' [ Debbie Harry turns 80: what next for Blondie? Opens in new window ] Born in northern California and steeped in Los Angeles, its history and its lore, Pratt is, naturally, influenced by The Beach Boys and their troubled-genius musician, songwriter and producer, Brian Wilson , who died in June. 'He seems like somebody who lived a rather tortured life. I hope that he's experiencing some peace now. I wouldn't say I'm in awe of that many people's bodies of work in the way I am with Brian Wilson's.' Pratt is chatty and curious. She wants to know where in Dublin I live and is surprised to hear that people have been priced out of the city and that it shares many of the problems around affordability and arcane planning laws that afflict Los Angeles and San Fransisco, where she used to live. But that hasn't put her off coming to Ireland, and she is looking forward to her first headline show here. She remains quietly astonished that she is a professional musician who tours the world, sharing her songs with friends and strangers alike. 'Playing shows ... there is nothing [like that] in my day-to-day life, or a lot of people's day-to-day life. We don't do that many ceremonial things on a day-to-day basis. And it feels very much like that kind of thing. 'Sometimes I think about the fact that I write songs and play them for people for a living, and that has not ceased to be very odd to me.' Here in the Pitch is released by City Slang. Jessica Pratt plays Vicar Street , Dublin, on Sunday, July 13th
CTV News
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CTV News
Osborne Village Music Fest rocks the neighbourhood
Winnipeg Watch Zohreh Gervais of Osborne Village Biz previews the new multicultural festival with 35+ artists, art installations, and indie music vibes.
Irish Times
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Euan Manning of Cardinals: ‘Things have flipped around. There might now be a villainisation of Irish culture'
They have been hailed as a band to look out for, their debut EP was critically acclaimed last year, and Grian Chatten of Fontaines DC declared them 'one of my favourite new bands' before inviting them on to the bill of his band's mammoth gig at Finsbury Park in London next month. Squirrelled away in their rehearsal studio in Cork city, Cardinals are shirking off the buzz – at least for now. Euan Manning, the group's frontman, his face framed by thick eyebrows that place him somewhere between Morrissey and a young Ian Brown, strikes you as the sort of person who doesn't get too frazzled by the hype machine. [ Irish music acts to watch in 2025: 22 to follow, from Cardinals to Yunè Pinku Opens in new window ] 'I feel like it does maybe have an effect,' he says, slightly hesitantly. 'You're hoping that you live up to it, but not to a crazy extent. But I don't know.' He sighs softly, shrugging. 'You try to just filter it out and keep the head down and keep working. Try to take it in your stride, I suppose. 'I feel like if you're going to listen loads to the praise, then when the not-so-nice write-ups come around you're probably going to end up listening to those, too. So I prefer to ignore both.' READ MORE Cardinals plough a similar furrow to The Smiths and other 1980s indie bands, with thoughtful, provocative lyrics and jangly guitars, although theirs is a looser, more raucous and ramshackle approach. Not that you'd know it by their influences; growing up, Euan and his brother Finn, who plays accordion in Cardinals, were more into rap artists. Euan smiles as he recalls the arguments they would have over Tupac vs Biggie. Now they both agree that the likes of Nas and Wu Tang Clan have been equally influential. While you certainly can hear traces of fellow Leeside bands such as The Frank and Walters and The Sultans of Ping in the band's musical DNA, the lyricism of hip-hop has also played a part. 'Especially Nas. I think his lyricism is pretty unmatched,' says Euan. 'It's probably one of the first times that lyrics had a real effect on me, rhyme and meter and those sorts of things – the theory parts of writing songs, the poetic techniques that he used extensively. And then the production and the beats hooked you in as well. 'It was all about the aesthetic image of these guys.' He allows himself a smile. 'Which is maybe strange, because we're small-town Irish country boys.' Although Cardinals are something of a family affair, with Finn on accordion and their cousin Darragh on drums (joined by Aaron Hurley on bass and Oskar Gudinovic on guitar), the band members, still in their early 20s, only came to fruition in recent years. Songwriting, says Euan, didn't become a serious pursuit until the first Covid lockdown. 'I'd been doing a bit of writing before that, [but] all I cared about was playing video games for a very long time,' he says, smiling. 'Then I found one morning that I didn't really care about it as much any more, and I had this great fear. I needed to find something to fill the gap. I think that's when it became important to me.' It was only about two years ago, he says, that the band found the sound they wanted to pursue after cycling through various subgenres. Their new single, Big Empty Heart, shows they're evolving at a rate of knots: it's a huge stride forward from early songs such as Amsterdam, their self-released debut single, with its tentative murmur, from 2022. 'And the stuff that we're doing now is different from what was even heard on [last year's] EP, really,' he says. 'It feels more cohesive as a body of work. It's more like us and less like we're wearing our inspirations on our sleeves.' It's not just music that has provided the band, who are from Kinsale, with inspiration for songwriting. Euan has previously spoken about how other artforms, including the work of the stained-glass artist Harry Clarke, have been an influence, and the whole band acknowledges how film – particularly Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher trilogy – played a big part in shaping Big Empty Heart and its accompanying video. Another element that sets Cardinals apart from their peers is Finn's accordion-playing, a skill acquired from the brothers' grandfather. It can be a difficult instrument to tour with, he says, not least when he's going through airport security. 'No matter where I am, they think it's like a bomb or something, because on the X-ray it looks crazy,' says Finn, laughing. 'I often get asked to take it out of the box in the airport and play a tune. I did it in Amsterdam once, and the guy called it gypsy music. But I've got to be careful with it: if it's fecked I can't get my hands on another one, like I could with a guitar.' He began playing the instrument at the age of 10 or 11, initially in the traditional style, but gave it up in favour of the guitar in his late teens. While at college in Galway, he picked it back up 'not to play traditional stuff on but to use as a tool, I suppose,' he says. 'I liked the idea of taking what I knew from the guitar and trying to play it on the accordion. 'When I'm [playing] it with Cardinals I'm pretty conscious of not trying to make it like a traditional Irish sound – because I'm not massively crazy about that sound, the mixing of Irish traditional and rock music. Some bands have done it well – but more bands probably not so well. So I'm conscious of writing something for the sake of the song rather for the sake of the instrument.' Cardinals The inclusion of a traditional instrument in a rock band is a good segue into Euan's assertion that Irish culture was being 'fetishised' by international audiences, although he has altered his position somewhat since he made those comments earlier in the year. 'I almost feel like with the news in the past few weeks, things have flipped around. There might now be a villainisation of Irish culture with the Kneecap stuff,' says Euan, referring to the terrorism charge brought against Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, aka Mo Chara, of the Belfast group, for allegedly displaying a Hizbullah flag at a gig in London in November 2024. 'It's mind boggling to us.' He shakes his head. 'There seems to be this real turn to the right all over the world, but there's great support for them. We think they're great, and courageous, and brave for how they're handling it. But, yeah, right now I think things feel a little bit different.' 'I think people kind of pick and choose what they like about Irish culture a lot, and I think that's part of the fetishisation,' adds Finn. 'But, yeah, there's definitely a certain villainisation going on because of [Irish bands' vocal support for Palestine] now, too. 'It's a pretty standard view for Irish people in general, I'd say – especially our generation, and especially artists – but I think people kind of had this idea of what the 'perfect Irish artist' was in their head. And now they're looking into it more, and seeing that a lot of us hold the same point of view on social justice – and maybe some Americans and Israelis are not too impressed.' He shrugs. 'But it's important.' Cardinals will share the support bill with Kneecap at Finsbury Park, which is likely to propel their trajectory skywards for the second half of 2025. An album is already in the works, with a tentative release scheduled for early 2026. If they keep advancing at the pace they're at, who knows where they might be in five years. 'It's a pretty big question,' says Euan. 'I mean, we'd just like to be releasing work that we're very proud of. But I think that we're all very ambitious as well – so if we can shoot for winning a Grammy or selling out a stadium or whatever, why not, like? You know? You just might as well think about it.' A smile plays on his lips. 'You know, we wouldn't be doing this if we didn't think that we were capable of such feats. So shoot for the moon and stars, and all that.' Big Empty Heart is released by So Young Records. Cardinals play Finsbury Park , in London, with Fontaines DC on Saturday, July 5th, and Kinsale Arts Weekend , in Co Cork, on Sunday, July 13th
