Wet Leg Delivers a Knockout Blow During Rowdy, Raw Dallas Show

Wreathed in smoke and light, Rhian Teasdale dropped to her knees. Clutching an electric guitar, she unleashed a blood-curdling scream that rippled through the room, as the audience emitted its own harrowing howl in reply.

The squalling climax of “Ur Mum” was emblematic of the ferocity British rockers Wet Leg brought to a sold-out South Side Ballroom every moment they were on stage Wednesday night.

Relentless, fully felt and intensely visceral in a way that made moments of the roughly 65-minute performance feel hallucinatory, it was an extraordinary showcase for one of the U.K.’s more dazzling recent exports.

The 32-year-old Teasdale, exuding the sort of effortless, magnetic rock star charisma too often dulled by the steady drip of 21st-century social media obligations, prowled the stage like a panther, often barely visible beneath the band’s veil of retina-searing strobe lights and persistent fog.

Her airy alto, which slips in and out of a sing-speak cadence, cut through the cloud like a buzzsaw, as her four bandmates — Hester Chambers, Henry Holmes, Josh Mobaraki and Ellis Durand — conjured a dynamic wall of sound as comfortable with delicacy as it was bombast.

Wet Leg’s return to Dallas for its first appearance here in three years was in service of the band’s recently released sophomore album, Moisturizer , the ever-so-cheeky title of this current run of dates is “Moistourizer.”

Despite the evening’s brevity (the total run time of the band’s catalog to date is just 74 minutes), the Brit Award- and Grammy Award-winning Wet Leg illustrated it’s already pivoting from the sharp, short and stinging salvos of its self-titled 2022 debut, exemplified by the non-sequitur-laced earworm “Chaise Longue,” the band’s giddy breakout hit, to something more vulnerable and more epic.

Elastic enough to sing about ketamine-fueled violence (“Catch These Fists”) and the simple pleasure of wanting someone to grow old with (“Don’t Speak”), Moisturizer suggests Wet Leg will endure beyond its initial flirtation with fame — there’s an almost quaint durability to these songs that belie the attitudinal rock veneer.

Opening with Moisturizer’s pummeling, rowdy “Fists,” which featured Teasdale striking a bodybuilder’s pose against a backdrop of stuttering strobe lights and the audience screaming in ecstasy, most of Wednesday’s highlights were pulled from the new record, nearly all of which was played, save a couple of tracks.

Sharp and Satirical

“Davina McCall” preserves Wet Leg’s razor-sharp satirical edge — “I’ll be your Shakira/Whenever, wherever,” Teasdale sings to her lover — while ramping up volume and density; the sweetly goofy sentiment lands like a piledriver.

Elsewhere, the raunchy, riveting “Pillow Talk” exploded like a nervous breakdown, while “Too Late Now,” from Wet Leg’s debut, felt like being trapped inside a car careening around hairpin turns as it picked up speed at a terrifying pace.

The band didn’t particularly have much to say to the adoring, capacity audience, which shouted back lyrics with gusto, phones held aloft to capture every moment. The boilerplate “How are you doing?” and “Thanks for coming” was pretty much the extent of it, save a few asides from Teasdale: “If you’d be so kind as to sing along, the more the merrier, you know?”

Banter wasn’t really necessary anyway. Wet Leg’s exhilarating fusion of lyrical wit and instrumental muscle sets them apart from most contemporaries in such a way as to make you wonder why more bands don’t try to infuse the spectacle with a little more substance. Striking a pose is easy; backing it up with songs that make you care is far more difficult.

In other words, something offered beyond the sugar high of superficial rock stardom does make for a far more satisfying meal. Scream it from the rooftops.

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