If you don’t already love Wet Leg, chances are their swift rise and self-deprecation induce a particular kind of cynicism. Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers arrived fully formed with the kind of infernally catchy indie rock hit not heard since the days of Franz Ferdinand and were instantly everywhere: played to death on British alternative radio; on Jools Holland and late-night U.S. talk shows; the subject of approving texts from your dad. They repel seriousness, claiming they only started the band for fun—on top of a Ferris wheel at a music festival, no less—and their songs mean next to nothing. Apparently they barely had time to meet their future label, Domino, because they were too busy “rolling around in the grass doing teddy bear rolls with the guitars.” Their lyrics cringe with embarrassment on behalf of anyone deluded enough to be in a band, with their warm beer and crap patter and arty parties. (It’s often said that their home of the Isle of Wight lags 20 years behind the rest of the UK, and Wet Leg’s suffocating social circle sounds straight out of 2005: the Cribs’ “Hey Scenesters!,” Art Brut’s “Formed a Band” and Arctic Monkeys’ “Fake Tales of San Francisco” writ large.) You might wonder whether Wet Leg embraced indie rock as part of their larky shtick—what could be more ironic than messing around with a destitute genre?—if they weren’t such a good study.
Teasdale and Chambers are carpetbaggers in the ultimate carpetbagging genre: You can play Magic Eye with their speed-addled guitars, tilting the music this way and that to spot flagrant trace notes of the Breeders, Parquet Courts, Wire, Pulp, Pavement, MGMT, the Strokes, Courtney Barnett, Blur, Elastica and a billion more bands besides. (On “Convincing,” the album’s biggest tonal outlier, Chambers sings wryly devastated Angel Olsen cosplay.) But it’s a sound that endures endless retreads as long as the hooks are good. For years, that bubblegum melodic facility seemed to have deserted bands of this ilk. The 2004 British wave stopped wanting to make “music for girls to dance to” and got sophisticated (read: boring), and the space they left was quickly filled by lumpen “whoa-oh-oh” football terrace chanters. Wet Leg have hooks stuffed with bait—and beyond convincingly consolidating past eras of guitar pop, they ply an idiosyncratic line in wild-eyed choruses that unspool in run-on bursts of mania, building to terminal velocity, tripping on internal rhymes, and dragging you down with them.