Music Monday: “Wet Dream” – Wet Leg

Music keeps you young.

It sounds like one of those pithy phrases you might find on a decorative wall hanging into the home of a not-so-young person. (Full-disclosure: at this point I am a not-so-young person.)

I’ve always said that music is essential to me. It’s something that fundamentally makes me happy. The more I’m listening to music and playing my own, the more cheerful and productive I get in every area of life. One of the difficult parts of making the switch to a fully-remote life during the pandemic was a lack of commute – not because I like commuting, but because it is where I got my required one hour of music a day.

As music has come and gone from my daily routine in the past few years, I’ve realized that it’s not only my mood that changes when I have tunes in my ears or beneath my fingers. I feel like my actual age oscillates. New music makes me feel mentally and physically younger.

That might sound delusional, so allow me to explain by way of Wet Leg.

I’ll be honest, when I heard there was a hip new band named “Wet Leg,” I did not leap to listen to their music. Hip bands with clever names and ironic, punny songs come and go every year, each putting their own tweak on the current trends in pop production. After a few years of not connecting with them at all, I felt like hearing each successive entry just made me feel older. I just didn’t get what the youths were into, which made me decidedly not a youth.

Then, one day last in 2021, I happened to see the YouTube thumbnail for Wet Leg’s “Wet Dream” video, featuring lead singer and guitarist Rhian Teasdale dressed like an erstwhile modern day pilgrim wearing a pair of oversized lobster claws.

“Okay,” I thought, “it’s a hip band whose first song shares a word with their band name and is accompanied by an ironic video. I am going to hate this. Here we go.”

Dear readers, I did not hate “Wet Dream.” I played it at least 10 times in a row.

Wet Leg is an indie rock band in the mold of Veruca Salt or Sleater-Kinney. Teasdale shares guitar, vocal, and songwriting duties with co-lead Hester Chambers, and they are backed up by a trio of rhythm players. “Wet Dream” musically sounds more like Sleater-Kinney, with a thrumming rhythm guitar underpinning a searing repeated lead line. Vocally and lyrically, it’s more like Veruca Salt, joltingly sexual even while it keeps the idea of being made into a sex object at arm’s length.

It’s a song can sling a refrain of “you were touching yourself” like an insult without being prudish about it.

I’m comparing Wet Leg to a pair of 25-year-old bands, which probably makes me sound old. It didn’t make me feel old. It felt like I was Théoden in The Two Towers, and every listen to “Wet Dream” was Gandalf was like knocking me in the head with his staff one more time to cause the years to magically slough off of my body.

That’s not because “Wet Dream” reminded me of bands of my youth. It’s because it was a moment of pure joy and discovery. It was a new thing that sent a thrill through my body. It was something that I love – a pair of women rocking mightily – without being deliberately retro.

This is how music keeps us young. We age when we cling to the favorite music of our youth as the only thing that can make us feel this way. We wait for the 10-year anniversary re-release and the 25-year anniversary tour so we can recapture that magic, but there are diminishing returns. We’re chasing a feeling we already had.

When you fall in love with a new song in the way you fell in love 25 years ago, you experience the pure, undiluted version of that feeling. When you’re open to the idea that that was not a fluke, and that there could be dozens or hundreds of new songs out every year that can give you that feeling, you’re not just discovering new music – you’re discovering a fountain of youth.

Wet Leg’s “Wet Dream” broke me out of a musical malaise in 2021 that was making me feel elderly. It reminded me that I didn’t have to endlessly replay my old favorites to chase that youthful high. It inspired me to spend time finding more amazing new music rather than assuming that “kids these days” weren’t making anything worthwhile.

Our bodies accumulate age. You can see it on our skin and in the lines around our eyes, and if someone cut us open they could measure it like they do with tree rings. But our bodies are only the constructs that help us move around the world. It’s our brains that interpret reality. Even as I get to the point where my body isn’t always feeling youthful in the ways that it used to, it’s up to my brain if I wake up every day feeling old or young.

Maybe it’s not music that does that for you. Maybe it’s films, or poetry, or food, or fashion. I’m certain there’s some kind of art or media in your life with the ability to reverse your inexorable aging, even if it’s all in your head.

For me, it was a “Wet Dream.”