Wet Leg, 100 Club, review: meet Britain’s hottest, wittiest, most danceable band
Wet Leg are the hottest new band in Britain, the anointed saviours of indie rock. And quite right, too.It was hard to tell who was having more fun at Wednesday’s crammed basement show at London’s 100 Club: the audience shedding their hipster inhibitions to roar along to giddily infectious choruses, or the band themselves, sharing smiles of incredulous delight and breaking into gleefully spontaneous giggles onstage.
They comprise two perkily self-amusing women, backed on drums, bass and keyboards by three hairy male rockers who conjure up a kind of Velvet Underground fuzzy drama, which the front duo overlay with oodles of vocal personality and surprising guitar hooks that sink in the very first time you hear them.
Wet Leg have the appearance of a gang of pals who threw a band together to play a student party and accidentally stumbled into the media spotlight. I’m sure it isn’t as haphazard as that, but everything is happening dizzily fast for them. Their deadpan vocalist and rhythm guitarist, Rhian Teasdale, met the quirkily inventive lead guitarist Hester Chambers at the Isle of Wight College, becoming close friends as they played solo and in folky bands on a DIY local scene. They united as a duo in 2019, wrote a bunch of sharp, witty songs aimed largely at entertaining each other, got snapped up by Domino, and released a comically surrealist, innuendo-laden debut single, Chaise Longue, in June 2021. With its drolly delivered jokes about “buttered muffins”, it quickly notched up millions of streams, aided by the pair’s wackily offbeat videos.
In January, Wet Leg registered second in the BBC Sound of 2022 poll, and anticipation is mounting for their self-titled debut album, which is due in April. A glorious follow-up single, Wet Dream, has added flowing melody and supercharged new-wave drive to their snarky spoken-word mix, as they put a creepy suitor in his place: “What makes you think you’re good enough to think about me when you’re touching yourself?”
Thanks to the unfortunate state of live music during the pandemic, Wet Leg have charged to the top of the incoming pile while hardly playing a show. Rather than being overwhelmed, however, they have approached each new step on the ladder with an air of excited glee underpinned by quiet confidence in their art. This is the third time I have seen them, and each show has been an absolute hoot.
The 100 Club was where The Sex Pistols unleashed the full force of punk on the world back in 1977, and while I’m not suggesting that Wet Leg will have anything like the same impact, this was as rowdily entertaining as any gig I have witnessed in that dingy but historic venue. The 13 songs that made up the hour-long set were snappy, catchy and inventive, demonstrating musical dimensions richer and wider than most of the bands in the explosive post-punk spoken-word scene currently gripping British live music.
The grungy ballad Obvious, for instance, demonstrated that Teasdale’s singing has emotional depths to explore, while a wonkily yet delightfully reworked version of Ronan Keating’s 2000 pop smash, Life is a Rollercoaster, provided a (hitherto unsuspected) missing link between My Bloody Valentine and Boyzone. If I were on the lookout for a band to save my faith in rock ’n’ roll, Wet Leg would fit the bill very nicely indeed.
Touring in the UK from April 7. Tickets: wetlegband.com