Broad City, which ran from 2014 to 2019, was a madcap sitcom about the New York City exploits of two best friends, Abbi and Ilana. Dwelling in that mid-20s chaos zone of crappy apartments and crappier jobs, the two women loved weed, hip hop, daft schemes and, most of all, making each other laugh. It was half autobiography and half live-action cartoon. The plots and jokes were a blast but the core of the show was the ability of stars and creators Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer to dramatise their real-life friendship — the unfakeable pleasure they took from each other’s company. You didn’t so much watch them as hang out with them.
When the rock duo Wet Leg appeared out of nowhere last summer, they reminded me of Broad City, if the stars had lived in the Isle of Wight rather than New York’s outer boroughs and preferred indie-rock to hip hop. I’m happy to play the music-critic game of ticking off musical antecedents — Elastica, Pavement, Courtney Barnett — but my first impression was that I was watching a sitcom about two best friends who formed a band for a laugh. On the cover of their self-titled debut album, Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers have their backs to the camera, arms around each other, heads close together as if sharing a hilarious secret.
That album topped the UK album charts in its first week, outselling the rest of the top five put together — a field which included not just new albums by Father John Misty and Jack White, but platinum juggernauts Ed Sheeran and Olivia Rodrigo. That’s a pretty remarkable achievement for an indie-rock band, let alone one that didn’t exist in the public eye this time last year. What makes Wet Leg’s breakout especially pleasing is the sense that it could have gone either way after their debut single, Chaise Longue, was hollered about last summer by everyone from Iggy Pop and Dave Grohl to TikTok teens.
With its garage-band simplicity and absurdist chorus, Chaise Longue felt more like a sketch than a pilot episode. Their delightfully weird deadpan humour (“Is your mother worried? Would you like us to assign someone to worry your mother?”) is the kind of lyric-writing that makes an instant splash but doesn’t necessarily lead anywhere. I wondered if they would ultimately be an indie-disco novelty act like Art Brut and Electric Six or, like LCD Soundsystem and Arctic Monkeys, a band whose initial offering of observational gags about deluded hipsters was just the tip of the iceberg. Jokes get people’s attention, but now what?
Not to worry. Wet Leg’s album is not just the year’s most briskly efficient hook machine; it has depth. Their superpower is making disappointment sound sprightly. They may be thoroughly jaded on Angelica (“The ambience was overrated at the party”) and I Don’t Wanna Go Out (“Now I’m almost 28, still getting off my stupid face”), and the line of lousy boyfriends may stretch out to the crack of doom, but these cherry bombs of melody and noise will surely soundtrack a lot of good times this year by returning indie-rock to first principles: life plus guitars.
Teasdale’s bulging quiver of tart put-downs and goofy innuendos suggests someone who sneaked out of the party with her mate to build her own kind of fun: a private garden where wallflowers can bloom. Unlike their myriad evil exes, hungry for cultural and erotic capital, Wet Leg remind us that you can form a band as a lark, a whim, a public extension of a private bond. As Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian, “they have taken their friendship and set it to music”. Everything’s rubbish except them.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeJust listened to Chaise Longue, and genuinely impressed by the wit.
I enjoyed it too.
“platinum juggernauts Ed Sheeran and Olivia Rodrigo.”
The success of pub singer Ed Sheeran baffles me, and I’ve never heard of Olivia Rodrigo.
I agree with you regarding Sheehan. His success defies all understanding. I checked out Olivia Rodrigo because she won a Grammy or something like that. Very boring. Check out Billy Strings, he’s great.Start with ‘Dust In A Baggy’.
Saw them at Rough Trade East. Absolutely brilliant.
Can you whistle one of their tunes for me please?
The article has some good observations and reference points, and I enjoyed it, however… “Wet Leg’s album is not just the year’s most briskly efficient hook machine; it has depth.” … the first point, only if you don’t listen to very much music, the depth? Well I found it predictably shallow. I did playlist the hit last year because it was universally catchy, and my listeners voted it near top of their best of list alongside more challenging stuff…. but I suspected it was a one hit wonder, and that’s really what it was.
Electric Six are still going and have had plenty of songs equally as good as whichever one you are referring to. Excellent live, too.
Okay, I will give them a listen. Thanks for the good review.
Wet leg rock.
Made in Middlesex by Alan Tyler is pretty good.
Who?
Insufferably precious.