“Someone once told me, ‘you should probably trust your own bad taste.’
From the word go, we made sure to do that.”
“Someone once told me, ‘you better trust your own bad taste,'” she recalls.
Wet Leg.Hollie Fernando
“From the word go, we made sure to do that with Wet Leg.
Why else would we have let these really dumb songs we recorded see the light of day?”
Timing played a key part.
Wet Leg.Hollie Fernando
“We were quite lucky,” says Hester Chambers, the group’s other key member.
“We normally play a support set,” she said with a giggle.
“We’re not used to playing this long.”
Wet Leg.Domino Recording Co.
“I just went back in time,” she joked, to the crowd’s delight.
As Chambers put it during our interview: “We’re here to give weird joy.”
At the same time, the full Wet Leg experience reveals something both more subversive and more substantial.
“One of our lyrics is ‘Why don’t you just suck my dick?’
Men have been saying shit like that for years, and you just let it breeze over you.
When a woman says it, it stands out.”
Teasdale gets more specific, pointing out that one commenter had misplaced the potentially shaven region in question.
“He thought it was talking about my vagina,” she says.
“I’m taking about my vulva!”
A key inspiration for her lyrical approach was Cardi B’s I-can’t-believe-she-just-went-there anthem “WAP.”
“Both have that great thing where they’re really silly but cool,” Teasdale says.
“It’s a very sheltered and rural place,” Chambers says of the Isle of Wight.
“There’s not much there.
Maybe that’s one reason many young people do music.”
They started playing fairly casually, taking up instruments in their teens.
“Even now, I’m still not confident [as a player],” she says.
Teasdale, 28, began playing piano in college but eventually got bored, so she pivoted to guitar.
“There’s something nice about being able to stand up when you play,” she says.
“And everything sounds like a pop song when you write it on guitar.”
In the years leading up to the formation of Wet Leg, the two worked various day jobs.
“It used to be so much fun/Now everything just feels dumb/I wish I could care.”
Some of that attitude came from a breakup she experienced before she began writing the songs.
“I wasn’t living for myself.
I would always think of him first.
I’ve given myself so much space now.”
Judging by the songs, she seems to have filled it with cynical humor.
Her songs burst with tersely flip non sequiturs like “You’re so woke/Diet Coke/I feel gross.”
It’s the kind of writing one might expect from someone who’s seriously stoned.
“The songs weren’t created that way,” Teasdale says with a laugh.
“We’re not that rock & roll.
I think we’re just naturally cruising around in an altered state.”
Even so, they were focused enough to put up a four-song demo on Sound Cloud in late 2020 .
“It was surreal,” says Chambers.
I was super worried about that.
“The imposter syndrome hits pretty hard,” says Teasdale.
“It feels like you’ve really pulled the wool over their eyes.”
“But,” adds Chambers, “the label hasn’t dropped us yet.”
“We were nervous about that,” says Chambers.
If not, we’re still enjoying what we’re doing.
Isn’t that what counts?"
Wet Legis out today.
