Left to right: Rhian wears **ALEXANDER MCQUEEN** dress, talent’s own bra, shoes, stockings, and rings, and **SONIA BOYAJIAN** bracelet. Hester wears **CHLOÉ** top and skirt, **CHANEL** shoes, talent’s own rings, and **ALEXANDER MCQUEEN** belt.

"What are we even doing here?"

Rhian Teasdale—one half of the duo that fronts the quintet Wet Leg—says this into a microphone while beaming a smile at her partner-in-song, Hester Chambers, as if they both just awoke from a dream, not quite certain they believe their own eyes. Half a world away from their home in the Isle of Wight, it’s mid-December in Los Angeles, at the Moroccan Lounge, and the small room is packed full of gleeful singalong fans for a band yet to even release a full-length record. The crowd might be compelled to ask the same question of themselves: why are we here?

Left to right: Hester wears **CHANEL** dress, **GUCCI** shirt, and talent’s own rings. Rhian wears **GUCCI** jacket and talent’s own rings.

Individual answers may vary, but the likeliest response is: everyone happened upon Wet Leg’s self-made video for their first single, “Chaise Longue.” It was directed by the band, during a time that felt heaven-sent back in June, like a supernatural beam of sunlight cast upon anyone who had turned grey and sullen over the course of the past two years, shut inside with dust motes and dark thoughts. Rocking chair, rocking horse, open fields, and vast skies, the video features Chambers and Teasdale exulting in the freedom of wide-open spaces. The timing was perfect.

Bedecked in pigtails, straw hats, and long white dresses, the video, fast accruing millions of views, somehow manages to evoke a mixture of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and the Farrelly Brothers’ Kingpin. Add in couplets about buttering muffins, heading to school to get “the big D,” and a bassline straight out of the Breeders’ songbook, and you have the ingredients for something that might make both Salvador Dalí and Stephen Malkmus nod in approval. In other words, it was almost too perfect.

Left to right: Rhian **ALEXANDER MCQUEEN** dress, talent’s own bra, shoes, stockings, and rings, and **SONIA BOYAJIAN** bracelet. Hester wears **CHLOÉ** top and skirt, **ALEXANDER MCQUEEN** belt, **CHANEL** shoes, and talent’s own rings.

“People ask us that all the time,” replies Teasdale, at the notion that some might question the organic origins of Wet Leg, arriving out-of-the-box, so fully-assembled, with such a clear vision of what they want to express musically and visually. “There are so many comments about us being industry plants...” and she trails off, looking into the distance with a crinkled expression as if she’s bitten into fruit gone rotten.

Chambers picks up where she left off.

“It might be more believable if we hadn’t signed to Domino [Recording Co.],” she says. “As a label, they’re just so keen for music. Music that they genuinely like and are passionate about. Rather than...” Chambers lifts her small hands to pantomime a pair of binoculars to look through, saying, in mock industry voice, “‘I spy a pop star!’” Teasdale adds.

“Sometimes it would be nice if they would say, ‘Do this!’” and Chambers nods and laughs, “It can feel daunting, that we’re given this much control. I guess it’s not too much, but it can be scary being the drivers of this big ship.”

Left to right: Rhian wears **ALEXANDER MCQUEEN** dress, talent’s own rings, and **SONIA BOYAJIAN** bracelet. Hester **CHLOÉ** top and skirt, **ALEXANDER MCQUEEN** belt, and talent’s own rings.

Wet Leg’s self-titled debut—recorded on their own, before any label interest—more than lives up to the promise of that initial burst of exultant joy anyone with a beating heart had with any of their first three short films. You see, to call them “music videos” feels dismissive of their artistry. For their second single, “Wet Dream”—a song Teasdale freely admits is about an ex-boyfriend calling her to tell her he had a dream the previous evening that culminated, in, well, the aforementioned climax—she sings, while waving lobster hands above tall grass, “What makes you think you’re good enough to think about me when you’re touching yourself?” The video ends with Teasdale upending a table (still in lobster hands) where bandmates—Ellis Durand (bass), Joshua Omead Mobaraki (guitar, synth), and Henry Holmes (drums)—devour portions of the ruby red crustacean in plastic bibs to Hester and Rhian’s horror.

Then, there’s the wish for bubble-bath transcendence in “Too Late Now,” a song that begins with a melancholy marching beat, echoing voices, and the atmosphere one expects to end a record in grandiose fashion. That is, until Teasdale sing-speaks an admission: “I’m not sure if this is a song, I don’t even know what I’m saying, everything is going wrong, I think I changed my mind again, I’m not sure if this is the kind of life that I saw myself living.”

In the accompanying clip, Teasdale suggestively unwraps large green cucumbers from their cellophane as the band stutter-steps in bathrobes, collecting soap bottles, and tormenting townsfolk—indeed, Wet Leg ends on a note back where they began, in a kind of limbo between confidence and doubt. Or, maybe it’s both, entwined, and therein lies the secret to their irresistible charm. Good songs, short films to make Luis Buñuel or Jacques Tati proud, yet delivered with a modesty that seems refreshingly out-of-step in a world where TikTok users have deemed themselves “creators.”

Left to right: Rhian wears **LOUIS VUITTON** cape, stylist’s own pants, and **SALVATORE FERRAGAMO** shoes. Hester wears **LOUIS VUITTON** jacket and pants and **HERMÈS** shoes.

“I’m glad it worked out this way,” says Teasdale, about recording the album on their own and the trio of self-made art films to accompany their first three singles. “I think if we had released ‘Chaise Longue’ and a label had said, ‘That’s done really well. Here you go, here’s some budget for an album.’ We would have shat ourselves and gone home. I mean, we’re already kind of shitting ourselves a little bit. It definitely felt like ‘fake it till we make it’ and it still does, to be honest.”

At the risk of overstatement, Wet Leg have arrived just in time to remind us that in the bleakest of our shared days, there’s always a book, a poem, a song, or these two women who refuse to retreat in the face global disarray to remind us that we always find a way out. Pure joy is a precious resource in short supply. If gas is expensive, happiness is priceless. Fill yourself up with whatever Wet Leg is fueled by and we all just might get out of this alive, together.