Wet Leg didn’t ask to be the most hyped British indie band in a decade. They just wrote some very good songs about being tired and bored and vaguely annoyed, and the internet decided that was what it needed in 2022. The machine took it from there.
Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers met at art school on the Isle of Wight, which is an appropriately strange origin for a band whose entire aesthetic is deadpan surrealism. Their self-titled debut landed fully formed – tight, funny, and unexpectedly moving when it wanted to be. “Chaise Longue” was unavoidable. “Wet Dream” was even better. The whole record felt like a band that had figured out what it was before anyone told them what they were supposed to be.
The second album, Moisturizer, was the harder test. There’s enormous pressure on second records – especially from bands whose debut generated this much noise – to either double down or evolve dramatically. Wet Leg did something smarter: they kept what worked and slowly let the emotional range expand. Moisturizer is funnier in some places and sadder in others than the debut, and it holds together as a complete statement in ways that second albums often fail to.
Their SNL UK premiere performance this week was their largest profile moment since the Grammy nomination cycle, and they didn’t squander it. On a stage that needed credibility, they delivered both the wit and the genuine rock chops. The irony is that their studied nonchalance requires enormous skill to execute – they just make it look like it doesn’t.
Wet Leg are the band that British indie needed and probably didn’t deserve after years of increasingly self-serious guitar music. They’re two albums in and still the most interesting thing happening on that particular island.