Wet Leg: Wet Leg review – going beyond the chaise longue on nuanced debut

Dreamy, lush, hooky and thunderous … Hester Chambers and Rhian Teasdale AKA Wet Leg. Photograph: Hollie Fernando

The novelty song is a dying art form. Deliberately silly, often profoundly annoying earworms by unestablished artists rarely factor into today’s pop universe. Instead, they have been replaced by the viral hit: a song by a nascent star that swiftly rises from obscurity to ubiquity, sating the appetite for newness and surprise with a bit more coolness and class. Although the viral hit is implicitly attention-grabbing, it doesn’t tend to be gimmicky – usually the accompanying social media craze (TikTok dance, or back in the day, Twitter meme template) takes care of that.

Wet Leg: Wet Leg album cover Photograph: PR