THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Wet Leg’s debut single Chaise Longue — delivered with dry wit, a Mean Girls nod and A thumping indie-disco beat — turned it into a runaway hit in 2021, and it was named one of the best songs of the year by countless media outlets. Now, the duo of Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers have dropped their self-titled debut album, an instant classic that peels back the layers of the band to reveal the smart, dark heart at the centre of it.
Wet Leg was mostly recorded in London, in April 2021, and the duo chose Dan Carey (Squid, Fontaines DC) to produce the bulk of it. They had recorded a lot of their demos at home, on Garageband, and a lot of audio from those sessions was reused, rather than rerecorded. “They were super-scrappy, but they already had an identity to them,” Rhian explains.
Rhian and Hester first met at college on the Isle of Wight — where they both grew up — when they were 17. One of Rhian’s projects was a solo act that she felt had come to the end of the line, and she was on the verge of giving up music completely. But first, to do some festival dates that she had already agreed to, she asked Hester to play guitar with her. What happened was a revelation. “We’d played in other bands before, but always with boys, and my experience of that was that boys always know what they want. Playing with Hester was different. We just gave each other so much space,” Rhian explains.
Wet Leg is cathartic and joyful and punk and scuzzy, and a dry sense of humour ripples through the album, whether that’s eviscerating a pretentious ex-boyfriend who sends unwanted texts (Wet Dream) or being sucked into the 3am doom scroll on the magnificent glam-stomp Oh No. “Wet Leg was just supposed to be funny,” says Rhian. More and more people are now in on the joke with the two of them, but that spirit remains at the centre of what they do. “As a woman, there’s so much put on you, in that your only value is how pretty or cool or sexy you look. But we want to be goofy and a little bit rude. We want to write songs that people can dance to. And we want people to have a good time, even if that might not possible all of the time.”
https://youtu.be/UB3PJwPMHzQ
