Concert Reviews

Regardless, the up-and-coming alt rockers showed a devastating confidence during their second trip to Boston.

By Marc Hirsh

September 15, 2025

3 minutes to read

Wet Leg, with Mary In The Junkyard, at Roadrunner Boston, Sunday, Sept. 14.

When Wet Leg last played Boston back in 2022 — which also happened to be the first time they played Boston — they were a curiosity, a band with just one fireball single to their name (the sleek and deadpan pickup “Chaise Longue,” from their self-titled debut that wouldn’t be released for another month) and little else but the excitement of possibility. At the time, it was plenty.

Since then, they’ve put out two albums, walked off with a handful of Grammys and a few other awards from their native Britain, and officially promoted the three touring musicians supporting the core twosome of Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers to fully-vested bandmembers. And on Sunday, they graduated from the electric but tight confines of the Paradise to the more expansive space of Roadrunner. And still they felt coiled and twisted and tight and hungry.

What’s changed is the nature of that hunger. Just before the ricochet riff flung opener “catch these fists” into a headlong churn, Teasdale literally flexed in a smoke-enshrouded backlit silhouette and held the pose long enough for the crowd to take it in. And so it was for the whole concert, Wet Leg showing off its strength and power in a way that was both performative and a simple statement of fact.

Part of it was that it was hard to fully gauge the band’s irony levels. On the Tove Lo-like “liquidize,” Teasdale slowly and suggestively leaned back and lunged forward in a parody of rock sexuality, something she returned to as she crawled on the stage in “mangetout” and rocked her hot pants from side to side in “jennifer’s body.”

Or maybe it wasn’t parody at all. Newer material like “don’t speak” and the surging “u and me at home” were practically sweet and vulnerable love songs, suggesting that Wet Leg is steering away from the stoic, dismissive transactionality that characterized the sex and relationships on their first album. Perhaps Teasdale was exploring feral sexuality not to wink at it but because she felt ferally sexual.

Regardless, she was devastatingly confident throughout, even when she was dropping her defenses. Her vocal in “Too Late Now” was measured and deliberate in the opening verses, and then the music sped up and she unleashed a barrage of words that expressed both uncertainty and a striving for meaning that sounded suspiciously like a mission statement.

That tension charged up the band, which turned every song into a short, sharp shock. (Wet Leg cranked through 19 songs in 70 minutes.) Teasdale’s was an unpretty voice used for unpretty ends, and her taunting singsong melodies fit neatly atop Ellis Durand’s scraping bass and the guitars of Chambers and Josh Mobaraki that alternately clipped along and gushed in bursts of noise.

It came out in “Being In Love,” where the clean kick drum thump and high chopped guitar pulse were washed away by a chorus where everything exploded, only to be brought back down with a satirically sunshiny “la la la” refrain. And it fueled the stomping swing of “Oh No,” with its keyboard skronk that periodically erupted in chaotic swells and Teasdale exaggeratedly intoning the title phrase in a way that felt both tossed off and overwhelmed. The hurtling “pillow talk,” meanwhile, was all static and momentum, honed to a point.

“Chaise Longue” was similarly built on a fleet guitar line skimming along a driving drumbeat that had a cog or two loose, with the added bonus of audience participation when the crowd shouted the “What?” response that used to belong to Chambers alone. But as Teasdale sang the lines inviting the front row backstage for wink-wink reasons, she briefly burst out laughing, one of the only real cracks in her façade all night.

Earlier in the night, there had been another that was easier to miss. It came during “pond song,” where Teasdale bounced across the stage to Chambers, pogoing in place with her guitar. And there, the two women who started Wet Leg seemingly as a lark looked at each other briefly and seemed to gawk in joyous wonder at how far they’ve come and what they’ve discovered they were capable of along the way. And they bounced harder.

Setlist for Wet Leg at Roadrunner, Sept. 14, 2025

• catch these fists
• Wet Dream
• Oh No
• Supermarket
• liquidize
• jennifer’s body
• Being In Love
• pond song
• Ur Mum
• davina mccall
• don’t speak
• Too Late Now
• 11:21
• u and me at home
• pillow talk
• Angelica
• Chaise Longue
• mangetout
• CPR

Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected] or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.

Marc Hirsh

Music Critic

Marc Hirsh is a music critic who covers a wide variety of genres, including pop, rock, hip-hop, country and jazz.

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