Dancing on the right side of serious, ultimate cool girls Wet Leg are living out their rock star meets cottagecore fantasy.

Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers formed Wet Leg in 2019 on the Isle of Wight, and after signing with Domino Records this summer they released their debut single and “Chaise Longue” — which blew our collective minds and saw them tipped as one of the most exciting new bands to watch this year. They never planned for this, but they had it coming; with charm in spades, wit in bucketfuls and tunes by the ton, it was inevitable. To celebrate, we took them to a suburban petting zoo to explore how all this fell into place — and play with some chickens.

  • HESTER (LEFT) WEARS
  • JUMPER RAG AND BONE
  • SHORTS AMERICAN VINTAGE
  • SOCKS FALKE
  • SHOES DOC MARTENS
  • RHIAN (RIGHT) WEARS
  • JUMPER RAG AND BONE
  • SHORTS AMERICAN VINTAGE
  • SOCKS FALKE
  • SHOES G.H. BASS

You have the best band name we have heard for a while — is there any specific origin or inspiration?

We were joking about the ‘band name generator’ (do you remember that website?) that is the emoji keyboard. We just tried loads of different combinations, blindly thumbing the keypad. [The water and leg emoji] happened and we were like yeah, this feels right. The band was started as a bit of a joke, just for the fun of playing — so having a dumb name like Wet Leg is a good reminder to not take ourselves too seriously.

What do the lives of Rhian and Hester look like when you’re not doing Wet Leg? What career paths have you pursued that brought you to this point?

Rhian: I’ve worked so many weird jobs since leaving school… I’ve always wanted to do something with music and have worked a load of bad jobs so that I could still have the time and flexibility to do music. But actually, if I’m being totally honest, I just didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself and my life, and pretending to myself that I was trying to do music alongside all these crap jobs was the only way to stay sane. It was a very long and hopeless string of shitty jobs — mainly loads and loads of waitressing, but I’ve also been an ice marshal, a large-scale puppet operator at a weird theme park, a crazy golf caddy… Then a couple of years ago I got really lucky and fell into doing wardrobe assistant stuff for commercials and music videos, which I really, really love, but recently I’ve had to stop doing because we’re so busy with band stuff now.

 

I’d pretty much given up doing music altogether actually, because I was so busy doing the self-employed hustle thing and had finally found a job that I really loved. But then lockdown came along, shoots were cancelled and I moved back to the Isle of Wight. Hester and I made some music videos of our own and wrote some songs just for the fun of it and as something to keep us both busy and sane amidst the seemingly endless pandemic.

 

Hester: I dropped out of my first year studying music at uni, and got scooped up into the family business of making jewellery. Dropping out was a bit sad as I wasn’t sure if that would be the end of music and me, but I somehow managed to keep making music with my pals whilst also learning a new skill, one that I love so much. I’ve been pretty darn lucky, really.

  • RHIAN (LEFT) WEARS
  • SHIRT AVAVAV
  • DRESS MOUMI
  • JACKET MAGPIE VINTAGE
  • HESTER (RIGHT) WEARS
  • DRESS MAGPIE VINTAGE
  • VEST SAMSØE & SAMSØE
  • SHORTS AMERICAN VINTAGE
  • HAT MERIWETHER
  • HESTER (LEFT) WEARS
  • COAT NANUSHKA
  • DRESS HUISHAN ZHANG
  • NECKLACE AND HAIR ACCESSORIES VICKISARGE
  • RHIAN (RIGHT) WEARS
  • DRESS MAGPIE VINTAGE
  • EARRINGS AND HAIR ACCESSORIES VICKISARGE

The subjects you talk about in your songs seem to be people we have 100% come into contact with in our time. Are they accurate profiles of real people or are they fictional?

I think we’re just trying to write fun songs that are a bit stupid and throwaway, but inevitably, yeah — some songs do end up being kinda laced with impressions of real people that we know. It’s hard to make anything without accidentally putting a bit of yourself and your own experience into it, however dumb and silly the subject matter. Whether you even consciously decide to do that or not, it’s just something that happens, I think.

 

In “Wet Dream” for example, that one probably came about when one of my exes went through a stage of texting me after we’d broken up telling me that he had a dream about me, that we were married and it was amazing… That’s probably where the inspo for “Wet Dream” came from, but I haven’t really thought about it ‘til now. It’s funny that.

  • HESTER (LEFT) WEARS
  • DRESS HUISHAN ZHANG
  • SHOES DOC MARTENS
  • NECKLACE AND HAIR ACCESSORIES VICKISARGE
  • RHIAN (RIGHT) WEARS
  • COAT CHRISTOPHER KANE
  • SHOES VAGABOND

The aesthetic of your band and the narrative you are creating, especially visually, is immersed in nature. What was the inspiration behind this?

Living on the Isle of Wight, it’d be difficult not to take advantage of living somewhere so beaut. All our music videos and press shots so far we’ve shot on the Isle of Wight, it’s just where we live so it’s kind of a no-brainer. It’s been the obvious and most natural thing to us, to choose our favourite locations on the island, take a camera and play around and see what happens. We’re both just a couple of country girls, so it’s fun to play around with these exaggerated small town cottagecore versions of ourselves in our visuals. It feels true to who we are and like a bit of a joke at the same time.

  • RHIAN (LEFT) WEARS
  • SCARF MOUMI
  • COAT SAMSØE & SAMSØE
  • SHIRT AMLUL
  • HESTER (RIGHT) WEARS
  • COAT NANUSHKA
  • SCARF MOUMI

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