Where Were You Try Again Meme
The songs made by Wet Leg, fronted past Rhian Teasdale (left) and Hester Chambers audio like they come up from nowhere, and also everywhere. Hollie Fernando/Courtesy of the artist hibernate caption
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Hollie Fernando/Courtesy of the artist
The songs fabricated by Wet Leg, fronted by Rhian Teasdale (left) and Hester Chambers sound similar they come up from nowhere, and also everywhere.
Hollie Fernando/Courtesy of the artist
As the music critic Joe Levy wrote 30 years ago almost Pavement, Moisture Leg is a band that feels simultaneously similar it came from nowhere and everywhere. History repeats itself: Another crew of droll, deadpan rockers has slouched out of an unlikely locale to rattle indie rock awake. As alluring and insouciant as those California boys Stephen Malkmus and Spiral Stairs were in 1992, Wet Leg'due south front duo of Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers seemed to sally fully-formed final summer with their sexy and giddy single "Chaise Longue." And but equally Pavement nodded without nodding at Jonathan Richman and the Velvet Underground, Wet Leg bears sonic echoes of New Moving ridge and '00s indie stone, and aesthetic and thematic similarities to contemporary television shows and fiction.
Moisture Leg is as fun to listen to as it is to think well-nigh, and in the band'southward loopy, addictive rock songs y'all can either turn your brain off completely, or turn your encephalon on to the sounds and styles of the far-reaching musical universe contained within it. And while Teasdale and Chambers would probably roll their optics at anyone who takes their music as well seriously, this calendar week they respond with a full-fledged statement of their own in Moisture Leg'southward self-titled debut, a collection of costless-wheeling stone songs peppered with dry talk-singing and sexual activity jokes, but also real moments of millennial existentialism. To greet its release, 3 NPR Music staffers discussed the affiliation of references leap upwards in Moisture Leg's inflow.
Ann Powers: We're here together because nosotros had the same question about Wet Leg — not whether they're the adjacent large thing (who cares) or even expert (with a band this derisive, qualitative judgments seem extraneous), merely ... where did they come from? Non literally, only in that lipstick-traces way in which all popular culture reflects many elements of its ain past. Each of us hears an entire history of music in this band. Merely we're picking up slightly different signals. So... what are we talking about when we talk nigh Wet Leg?
Hazel Cills: Nosotros made a 69-vocal playlist of all the things Moisture Leg reminds u.s. of. My contributions mostly came from two sonic spaces: i, the recent, mostly U.1000. post-punk revival, bands like Dry Cleaning and Shopping, who are cartoon on the sounds of original post-punk groups like Kleenex, the Au Pairs and Delta 5. So this idea of the female f***-up in rock — that 2011 to 2016 era with acts like people similar Bully and Childbirth and Tacocat who were kind of working in like Riot Grrrl lineage, almost in the same vein as Liz Phair's "F*** and Run": songs most being in your 20s and waking up hung over and sex being kind of reckless. I hear a very specific strain of immature, millennial messiness that has been really pop not but in music merely in pop civilization at big.
Powers: Nosotros represent three different generations and it's interesting: We all hear a bit of our youth in this band, the kind of moment in youth where you lot're nevertheless wild and experimenting, but you're besides realizing that maybe this isn't so good for your encephalon. I remember once when I was a kid in San Francisco, being on the train with my friend after a night of immoderacy and my friend turning to me and proverb, "Did y'all know when you drink too much the next 24-hour interval, your brain shrinks?" And feeling my brain shrinking in my caput at that moment! Wet Leg is the sound of your brain shrinking, only it's likewise the audio of what happens to brand your brain shrink.
What I loved in my youth was original punk and New Wave music, and peculiarly the oddballs in those scenes — bands similar the Flying Lizards, the B-52s, singers similar Lene Lovich and Nina Hagen. Often those artists engaged in a similar kind of speak-singing. They were often women, though not e'er. They also often represented a kind of, I don't want to say marginalized because that's not the right term, simply more than nether-recognized identity. I immediately thought of an artist like Lovich, this crazy singer who dressed like she'd just stepped right out of a dumpster and walked through an enchanted woods. She fabricated wild songs, similar her critique of consumerism, "New Toy," which sounds and so much like a Moisture Leg song. Or the B-52s, with Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson skewering traditional femininity past wearing pink wigs and cocktail dresses, then singing unhinged, sci-fi Stepford Wives songs like "52 Girls." There's something near Moisture Leg's style of inhabiting the "normal" both in the music and in their presentation to the earth that is exactly what New Wave meant to accomplish: some sort of an opening for people who were not part of the original rock myth.
Jacob Ganz: The music that I kept finding myself drawn to when I thought about Wet Leg doesn't really sound anything like Moisture Leg. But information technology did sally one generational cycle ago in a moment when there was a desperate hunger for most cartoonishly traditional rock from bands. I idea of bands like The Hives and The Donnas who were enacting archetypes of rock and whorl that are correct at the surface of the songs and performances. For a certain audience enlightened of stone history and how the genre has risen and fallen, it was impossible to plough away from those songs. Whether yous liked them or not, there was a need to have an stance about them.
I retrieve I'thousand reminded of that garage revival moment because, equally much as its music draws on the odd rock sounds you both correctly link to bands of the '70s or today, Wet Leg isn't using those sounds to face abroad from the mainstream or present a kind of outsider accept on traditional rock and curlicue. Information technology'south a band that, like The Strokes or, a few years subsequently, tongue-in-cheek revivalist acts like The Pipettes, understands exactly where it fits in the lineage of rock and roll. But here's the difference: Wet Leg executes that part with so much playfulness and humor that information technology keeps some of the "saviors of rock" nonsense that accompanied those bands at arm's length. Are they representing anything? The focus of the sound and the seeming lack of obligation to a scene or ethos is impressive. Anything in the history of this very narrow genre is accessible to such bands, right? It's like globalist locavorism — they tin can brand commerce or production out of annihilation, merely they're choosing a really precise row of influences to practice that inside.
Powers: That leads to a question that people seem to take nigh Moisture Leg — how calculated is this project? That question is i that resonates across the history of the music we're discussing. (Call it odd rock or outsider rock or off-kilter rock). Humorous songs, the wacky songs oft made by women, are always suspected to exist artifice or calculated. Guys I knew would inquire, are the B-52s even really a ring? Is Cyndi Lauper actually New Moving ridge, or just faking it? I remember those early on New Wave icons, there's a little flake of them in Wet Leg. There'due south this energy of: I'm doing femininity, but I'm doing it like a fiddling off or maybe flamboyantly off.
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Cills: I have absolutely been skeptical of Wet Leg — not in the sense that I think they're an "industry plant," because those things don't actually exist — but I exercise think Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers are very savvy and it's interesting that nosotros're talking and then much about the '80s, the era of the music video, because the pressures on artists to stand out in an overcrowded field and make a really stiff visual and hook that can be looped on TikTok into a meme are more intense than e'er. When I outset heard "Chaise Longue" and I saw the video for it, I felt like I knew exactly what these girls were doing immediately. I could run into their references, down to the clothes they were wearing and the ways in which they were singing about sex.
At that place are also a lot of moments on this anthology of existent emotional vulnerability — an "I'm nigh 28, I didn't expect my life to look this mode" lyricism — merely they never linger on them. Teasdale and Chambers wield that New Moving ridge coldness aesthetically, and they don't really allow the listener become close. Perchance I'm demanding too much emotional intimacy from them, because they're clearly a very playful band. But I think that emptiness also kind of contributes to my skepticism, and too because the imagery of the f***-up is so well-worn in pop culture, information technology's an experience that doesn't feel necessarily equally sharp to me anymore.
Powers: I see an interesting relationship between the words and the music in the fashion that Teasdale delivers these lyrics — which for me adds depth. Like the song "Supermarket," where it's only kind of a whimsical love vocal most transforming a place of commodity exchange into a magical identify when you are young and in dearest. Just then there's that chorus of "Nosotros got also high, nosotros got likewise high." They're using ghoulishly, about helium-inflated voices. And then in the heart of the song, she's trying to innovate this partner to her parents, and he gets too high in that situation, which is actually a night moment. The playfulness of [her] vocalization undercuts the darkness of the moment.
That song in particular really fabricated me retrieve of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and her [show] Fleabag, and Waller-Bridge is someone who'due south really mastered the power to go to that dark moment and deliver true pathos. Just perhaps not giving the states that moment is the true challenge. Staying in that more disaffected land doesn't deliver a catharsis that'south more conventional, and maybe that'southward what's interesting about this band.
Ganz: It does experience like an anthology dedicated to a detail time in a young person's life when y'all tin meet the end of that period of being immature. When you wake upwards feeling those regrets but yous exercise the same thing once more the adjacent weekend, just make the same decisions over and over again. The Wet Leg album feels very zine-y in some ways, like only Xeroxed notes about the things that happened last weekend. No fourth dimension to zoom out and assign meaning to the drove of events.
Cills: The music is very zine. But what I connect it to is that mid-2010s moment I was talking well-nigh earlier where yous had all of these women who were making music in a very '90s lineage about their lives. I think of a song like "Trying" by Bully, where she sings about praying for her flow all week. And I think Wet Leg is picking upward on that trend of articulating a kind of anxious, young millennial experience, merely they're bringing a new kind of numbness articulated in a wider style across pop civilisation. We mentioned Fleabag and Lena Dunham, merely they too feel connected to writers like Ottessa Moshfegh and Halle Butler, whose heroines are very common cold, bitchy young women and professionally bumming. Or Sally Rooney, whose young characters can't articulate their feelings in an emotionally vulnerable style, women who put upward walls.
Powers: There's an honesty to that rejection of what we're normally asked to requite. By "we" I hateful both women and artists. Sincerity, actuality, all of these things. I'm thinking well-nigh Debbie Harry singing "Rip Her to Shreds," which was always ane of my favorites. She was this classically gorgeous, Hollywood movie-looking person, but in her song bear on and in the way she looked out at you in functioning, [she] very much denied that she would ever give herself to you in whatever style. I think that'south ane affair about Wet Leg — they're non giving themselves away. Think well-nigh that in contrast with the pop indie stone artists who requite themselves away, almost equally a strategy? People like Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Bakery, Mitski. Their whole thing is intense emotionality presented almost as a tonic: what nosotros need in this f***** up fourth dimension. I beloved all those artists, but sometimes you lot just need to laugh it off, y'all know?
Cills: I recall that's what confuses me personally about Wet Leg because information technology'south like, I love a cold woman. I love a woman who slips through your fingers. I mentioned the Au Pairs and I love Lesley Woods as a lyricist and vocalist because you can never quite tell if she'southward joking or if she's being serious in one-half of those songs. And I recollect the expectation that every young woman artist should be writing sincerely about their experiences or sort of giving over their emotional vulnerability is such a trap. Merely I think with Wet Leg, in that location'south just something about their packet that gives me pause. And perchance information technology has to do with the fact that information technology is so well received or that song did go viral. And if "Chaise Longue" did get viral and it was so well received, and then what is the kind of bitter, withholding argument that'south actually being made there?
Powers: I wanted to heighten one thing to the group, which is do y'all see any human relationship between this album and hip-hop? Because I was thinking about all the moments when this kind of off-kilter, spoken give-and-take-driven rock surfaces, and it's often at a moment when hip-hop is posing a real challenge to rock truisms.
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Cills: I think there is a relationship. I was thinking about the way Wet Leg sings nearly boys, specially in a song like "Wet Dream," and how they oftentimes brand fun of men. It's very emasculating. And I was thinking about "WAP," which is one of the concluding great pop songs near sexual activity, but men are almost just a tool to be used in that song. I thought information technology was funny, when I read Rob Tannenbaum's profile of the ring for The New York Times, that "WAP" was the only song Wet Leg referenced as being an influence. Their music may not sound like rap, only if we think well-nigh who dominates that genre right now information technology'southward Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, it'southward more than alternative artists like cupcakKe, women who are doing something enervating and funny and grotesque with how they talk about sex and want, simultaneously flirting with just also making fun of men. Information technology'due south music for boys who desire to be stepped on.
Ganz: I don't know, it'southward never embarrassing when I climb on the hood of a car and lick the windshield.
Powers: I don't call back Wet Leg's success is going to lead to rock coming back to the heart of anything. I call back those days are gone. Only I think that's i reason why a lot of older stone fans beloved this band.
Ganz: It's an argument for the usefulness of stone as a genre or as a delivery machinery. Just a lot of the goofiness and the self-sabotage that is function of a lot of great rock has been gone for a long time or at least not part of the center. They have managed to pull that into a package that is very palatable. They tin do information technology, it seems based on this record, over and over once again, depending on your tolerance.
Powers: We should talk about the band'due south visuals, starting with the video for "Chaise Longue," which really was equally much office of their breakthrough as the sound of the vocal. Hazel, what was your take when you first saw information technology?
Cills: I immediately thought almost the clothes they were wearing, those kind of Little Firm on the Prairie, almost Amish-mode dresses that have been very en vogue for a certain 20-something woman for the last 10 years — mode brands like Ganni and Batsheva. I idea about the wrongness of information technology; these are two young women who are singing about sex, only they're dressed similar schoolmarms. And I thought too nigh artists like Su Tissue and Exene Cervenka, '80s artists who wore aprons on phase and contorted a conservative piece of clothing into something punk rock. And I call back those clothes are an extension of the artful coldness but likewise humor of Moisture Leg'due south music — clothing that keeps you at a distance, almost as a troll. They're saying, yous're non going to get me emotionally, and yous're also not going to get me physically, but I'g going to joke about sex and mayhap imply that it could happen between u.s., possibly in your dreams.
Powers: That was a smart move. It'southward peradventure calculated, peradventure not, in a pop landscape where and so much is exposed, not only emotionally, equally we talked about before, but in terms of bodies, right? When we tune in to an awards bear witness, nosotros encounter lots of flesh, male person and female person and non-binary at this indicate. And there is an explicitness in the mainstream — I never desire to say it's more than than always because I retrieve everything in pop is cyclical. It'due south sort of a mid-70s moment when in that location's a lot of nudity and sexuality on stage. Here'southward this band that is like, no, I'm not going to do that. And then there's an interesting element of self-protection embedded in the human relationship between the two women at the heart. That'southward not so much something y'all hear in the music because you don't really hear Chambers' voice that much. But in the video, she'southward actually fundamental as a foil for Teasdale, as the all-time friend who's hugging her and holding her up.
Cills: I don't know if I hear female friendship in the music. I feel similar it'southward more lone. There are a lot of lone moments on the album besides.
Ganz: I hear friendship in the presentation. When you hear Chambers' vocalism, it's often in directly response to something Teasdale is saying. Chambers also plays the lead guitar on the record and and so much of the tune and the fun and the attraction of the music is dependent on those guitar lines. Teasdale's vocals are so flat and monotone, but the songs get energy from the guitar. On many of the other songs, whatsoever melody that exists in the vocals is actually cribbed directly from the guitar line. So it does feel similar in that location is a musical element where Chambers is that same kind of support, building a wall or building protection.
I did a little slightly trolling thing of putting a vocal by The Solitary Island on our playlist. And I call back that humor — particularly inside humor between friends — is an essential thing in this music. Information technology's not a coincidence that there are ii large, dumb inside jokes in "Chaise Longue." The first affair that she says is trying to convince us that her parents don't know that the "Big D" is non actually her degree. And so that "Is your muffin buttered?" line, which is stolen from Mean Girls. You lot know that the ii of them are going off and laughing most having delivered those jokes to you every bit an audition. You might know you are not included in the laughter, merely you're a necessary prop for the delivery of the joke.
Powers: Hateful girls and meme girls. Chambers is sort of like a hype human being in a style, like she'due south the Flavor Flav to Teasdale'south Chuck D, or possibly the Bob Nastanovich to Stephen Malkmus. I was actually surprised at the alive show in terms of how much fun they were having on stage with each other. It didn't feel choreographed; they weren't wearing the prairie dresses. The band was real, not put together in a London studio, and information technology felt like that was another place where the friendship was located.
What's funny well-nigh rock and curl? Moisture Leg's catchy, playfully droll songs come beyond similar low-stakes inside jokes masking the anxiousness of the millennial experience. Hollie Fernando/Courtesy of the artist hibernate caption
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Hollie Fernando/Courtesy of the creative person
Ganz: I do think it's possible that playing live will change the band. It's interesting to recall that the record was made before anybody heard information technology — it was completely finished earlier anybody heard any of these songs. In The New York Times profile that was presented every bit something strange, but maybe it's rare in a valuable fashion to take hold of a band before there is any awareness of who they are out in the world. And maybe the pandemic allowed that to happen in a way that hasn't happened in more normal recent times. But in this anthology we accept a document of a band that was non yet influenced by the public's demands for what they do in any way. They had non toured. They had not played live. They didn't take any songs on SoundCloud. They were a new thing and somebody had the great thought non to wait for them to evolve – to put them in a studio and capture that newness whole.
Powers: It reminds me of when Pavement'south Slanted and Enchanted came out. And Joe Levy wrote a piece for The Hamlet Vocalization where he said the band's sound came out of nowhere. There was only this image of these immature men walking beyond the dusty, central California fields to alter rock. This idea of a sound coming out of nowhere is such a necessary rejuvenation, it seems for rock — over and over once again.
Cills: This is why the term industry institute keeps getting thrown around by younger audiences considering the music manufacture has changed so quickly that younger audiences are used to an artist going viral and then they get signed and then they tape material. The idea of someone having demos and shopping those to a label or earlier their career takes off is but strange. Information technology creates a kind of skepticism when a young person sees an artist and they're not already inundated with their torso of piece of work.
Ganz: It's kind of a privilege to get to experience it in 2022. That'south a thing that used to happen all the time. We didn't accept access to those early materials. Nosotros didn't take admission to bands touring or videos of them playing live. Nosotros saw the records show up on a shelf in a record shop and y'all bought it or you lot didn't.
Powers: That's the real Footling House on the Prairie s*** about this band.
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Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/04/09/1091730938/lets-talk-about-wet-leg