Sound of 2022: Wet Leg 'started a band for fun, now it's doing really well'

At the end of the final night of the final festival of the summer of 2018, friends Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers surveyed the antics from their serene seat on a vintage Ferris wheel.

"It just felt like this calm bubble," Teasdale recalls.

"You know sometimes when you get up from a table and you've been drinking too much and you go to the bathroom, and then have that moment on your own and you get this existentialism - sometimes in a bad way, sometimes in a good way?"

Being on the fairground ride was like that, she explains. In a good way. "Being on the Ferris wheel, above the crowd, above everything, just me and Hester looking into like the night sky... It was a pretty romantic way to start a band."

As they slowly spun though the summer night, the pair made a pact - to stop just talking about forming a group, and actually do it.

They had met at music college on the Isle of Wight, where they live. Teasdale had been struggling to make a stab at a solo career as a self-consciously kooky singer-pianist. Unhappy and lonely on tour, she asked Chambers to accompany her on guitar for a run of gigs.

As they travelled around festivals, talk often turned to starting a proper band, making "entirely different music to what we were making at the time". They would stop taking themselves so seriously, have no expectations, and would fit the group around their day jobs.

"What have we got to lose?" they said, according to Teasdale. "Who cares if people think we're rubbish or I'm just really bad at guitar? Let's just do it for the fun of it and see what happens."

Three years on, their band, Wet Leg, have come second on the BBC's Sound of 2022 list, which highlights the most exciting musical talent for the new year. One act from the top five is being revealed every day this week, with the winner announced on Thursday.

"We just started it as a joke," Teasdale explains about the band. "And it's doing really well, and there's all this buzz and hype, which feels a bit strange."

Wet Leg's ascent started in 2021 with a series of gloriously irreverent and infectious art-pop singles.

The first, Chaise Longue, hit the sweet spot between being deeply cool and satisfyingly silly. Inspired by Chambers' grandfather's furniture, it features a string of innuendos including a classic quote from the 2004 film Mean Girls ("Is you muffin buttered? Would you like us to assign someone to butter your muffin?")

That wasn't a flash in the pan. Follow-up Wet Dream is an equally enjoyable message to an ex-boyfriend, while Too Late Now captures the confusion of modern life - but nothing that can't be fixed by a bubble bath.

Those pithy and bouncy indie anthems have built anticipation for their debut album, which will be released in April.

Teasdale spoke to BBC News about their rise, their love of longboarding - a type of skateboarding - and the whereabouts of the actual chaise longue.

How did 2021 treat you?

A lot's changed. We signed to Domino, we found our management. Then they lifted lockdown restrictions and it was Latitude Festival, two weeks after releasing our first single, Chaise Longue. And now I'm sitting here in a hotel room in LA. It's just not right! It's really strange.

You probably didn't think things would happen so fast.

When we started the band, it came out of a place of just wanting to do a band alongside our jobs. Me and Hester had been so busy working that we thought, oh, we'll just do this as a side hobby kind of thing. And yeah. We couldn't have imagined this.

Is that part of the secret? You don't take things too seriously in your music, so maybe approaching it that way and not having grand ambitions has been a benefit.

I would agree with that entirely because I'm not writing music for anyone else. You're just writing songs purely to have a good time and just please yourself. It's funny.

But, like all overnight sensations, you've been working and plugging away for a long time.

Yeah, I had a solo thing that I was doing for five years, but never really got anywhere with it. And I just didn't really enjoy it to be honest.

Has the pandemic hindered the life of a new band?

I think it's worked in our favour, if I'm honest. So far. We released Chaise Longue two weeks before Latitude and that was the first festival after restrictions were lifted. And then everything's been quite happily snowballing since then.

It was a bit of a shame that when we were supporting Declan McKenna, we couldn't really hang out with him and his crew much. It was our first support tour, so I guess in that sense, we missed out.

Because you were bubbling?

Yeah. We stayed safe. We haven't done too badly. But I really feel for some bands. I've got friends that had calendars of really exciting gigs and shows abroad, and they've just had to take a big marker pen and cross everything out.

How did longboarding help?

It was terrifying to start with, but we went every day, pretty much, in lockdown on the Isle of Wight and hung out in car parks. We'd switch between that and making music videos and making demos. We just had the longest summer holiday.

When you get out of your teenage years you think, I can't possibly learn anything new. So it's a physical life lesson where you think, I can't do this, and then you practice it and put some time into it and put some effort into it. And then you can finally nail the trick that you're wanting to do.

And then you can carry it on to any mental barriers that you put up. I didn't really play guitar before this band, so it's been good for thinking, you can do anything that you want to do. You just have to put some time into it and practice it and you will get better.

Who are your all-time musical icons?

Bjork. Hester would probably say Adrianne Lenker from Big Thief and The White Stripes. And The Strokes, the Kings of Leon, PJ Harvey and Joanna Newsom.

Where is the chaise longue now?

It's still in Hester's flat and I will still sleep on it whenever I go round there and it gets quite late. She's like, "Shall I just make up the chaise longue for you?" I'm like, "Yeah, go on then."

Do people ask to come and see it and sleep on it and do anything else?

No, people haven't! No-one's requested to come and see the chaise longue. But people do say, "Can we come and drink some warm beer with you guys?" [In another lyric, they invite someone from the front row to drink warm beer with them on the chaise longue.]

What do you love about Mean Girls?

It's a cult classic chick flick. There are so many great lines in it that, day-to-day, I'll say. Like, "Remember, I'm not like a regular mom, I'm a cool mom, OK?"

It's really funny and it's aged really well. It's just a really important film.

Is there anything that, if and when you do it, you'll think you've achieved your musical ambition?

I just can't think beyond anything that we've done. Earlier this year, I was thinking it'd be great to find management and sign to a really cool label. It would be cool if we could go on Jools Holland. And wouldn't it be great if we could record an album with [producer] Dan Carey? [All of which have happened.]

And, oh, wouldn't it also be fun if one day Idles would have us support them? We've been booked to support them in January - whether or not that will happen now because of Covid, I'm not sure.

But everything that we joked about has kind of happened. And everything beyond it, I wouldn't be able to even dream of. I don't know what we're doing here. It's so funny.

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