I was not convinced when Wet Leg first appeared last summer. Initially I had ‘Chaise Longue’ pegged as “Posh Girls play at Post-Punk Pop”, yet somehow I kept coming back to it like a loose tooth’s exquisite pain. The song seemed difficult to avoid, after all, as it became one of those things that clog up social media streams, shared endlessly by old blokes proclaiming it to be The Next Big Thing. I presume that The Young People were also enjoying, but I had/have no way of telling (something for which I was/remain, eternally grateful). 

Then slowly it dawned on me that yes, ‘Chaise Longue’ might play at being Post-Punk Pop but more than this it plays with those tropes. Plays up to them. Gleefully. Naturally. Unknowingly, perhaps, even as everything seems knowingly posed and poised. 

And whilst I say that this awareness came to me slowly, in reality the conversion was over in a matter of a week or so. Yet such are the magical properties of the best Pop music that time itself at that point seemed suspended, wrapping deliciously inside of itself, walls melting and dripping psychedelic visions of textual reference that slipped in and out the black hole of consciousness. Something like that, or nothing at all like that. Put the virtual needle back at the start of the record and play it, Sam.

I’m playing ‘Wet Leg’ now, then, and it already feels like a record trapped in its own amber. It glows with warmth and humour yet also feels detached and strangely distant; a record very much of, or before its time. Once again, this is no criticism per se, and if anything it is another sign of Wet Leg’s strength in being magically ephemeral. ‘Chaise Longue’ still sounds simultaneously naturally strange, casually awkward and yet confidently knowing: The sound of an Art School band camping it up like Roxy Music in a 21st Century teenage daydream or Life Without Buildings sensuously struggling against restraints. ‘UR Mum’ and ‘Oh No’ are the sound of Millennial nightmares given form; glimpses of surreal slippage into the sound of confusion where we vacillate between the effects of uppers and downers, trapped in the primal scream of existential bliss. ‘Angelica’ meanwhile is a kid sister to Brakes’ monstrous ‘Heard About Your Band’ after being slipped a sleeping draught and sneaking between the sheets to snuggle Sonic Youth’s ‘Hey Joni’. Or it isn’t. I’m not sure really, and that is part of the appeal.

What I am sure about is that ‘Wet Dream’ is still the best of the bunch, still the diamond that cuts to the quick. It is a knee-trembler that sounds like its title suggests it ought, all salacious winks and seductive nods. It’s over and done in two minutes and twenty seconds. A quick one whilst we’re away with Conan Doyle’s fairies, which again means that we inhabit surrealist landscapes of technicolor psychedelic sensuality. Extra points for the best handclaps in Pop for decades and for dropping ‘Buffalo 66’ into lyrics that are classic bubblegum poetry.

‘Wet Leg’ then is a premature ‘Singles Going Steady’; a can of Fanta laced with strychnine; Jelly babies soaking in an acid bath; a flamboyant firework fading in the chill of a Prussian blue night. The vivid flashes might already be fading memories and the scent of smoke might linger a while to spark ever receding Prustian memories, but gosh it was a blast whilst it lasted.