Wet Leg’s sex-infused wired chaos meets Blondshell’s intimate tension in a night of sharp hooks, quiet storms, and cathartic release.
Each year, between weekends one and two of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, artists slip into nearby venues for intimate, off-schedule sets. Fans paying attention can catch both rising acts and established names in rooms far smaller – and far more immediate – than the desert stages.
The midweek pull of the Fox Theater in Pomona carried a different voltage as a sold-out room leaned into a night that promised sharp edges and sly smiles. Wet Leg and Blondshell make for an interesting pairing on paper – one band trading in deadpan absurdity, wiry hooks, and sexually charged lyrics. The other was excavating the messier corners of modern malaise, but in practice the contrast felt deliberate, even necessary. What unfolded was a carefully staged emotional gradient.
Blondshell opened the evening without ceremony, stepping into a dim wash that favored mood over spectacle. There’s a particular tension to her songs – confessional without being indulgent, controlled even when the subject matter threatens to spill over. Live, that tension tightens. The guitars carried more weight than on record, pushing her vocals forward like a tide that refuses to recede. Tracks that already felt intimate on record became something closer to confrontational, as if the room itself had been pulled into the conversation.
What stood out wasn’t volume or velocity, but restraint. Blondshell understands when to let a line land, when to let silence do the work. The audience, initially restless in that pre-headliner way, gradually synced with her pacing. By the midpoint of the set, the chatter had thinned, replaced by a collective stillness that felt earned. It’s not the kind of set designed to win over everyone in the room – but it doesn’t need to be. It carved out its own space and invited, then pulled the listeners to meet it there.
Wet Leg, by contrast, arrived like a release valve snapping open. Where Blondshell leaned inward, Wet Leg expanded outward, filling every available inch of the Fox with kinetic energy and a sexy sideways humor, opening with the empowering “Catch These Fists.” The band’s charm has always hinged on a balance – cool detachment wrapped around songs that are, at their core, deceptively precise. Live, that balance tilts slightly toward chaos, and it suits them. But, in sharp contrast to their extroverted live performance reputation, the band spent much of the performance hidden behind a heavy layer of smoke, blinding backlights, and dark mood lighting.
Rhian Teasdale commands the stage with a presence that had you straining to see through the over-used fog machine to not miss a single movement. Her performance felt both casual and calculated, slipping between the sardonic lyrical quips and sudden bursts of intensity. The band, normally very reserved, stayed in the shadows behind her and tightened the screws, turning familiar tracks into something more muscular, more immediate. What might read as novelty on record – those offbeat lyrics, the clipped phrasing – landed with sharper intent in the room, each punchline carrying a little more bite. The spotlight solely remained on Teasdale for the entire performance, with the other founding member, Hester Chambers, sharing the spotlight only once during a guitar interlude.
Wet Leg, the young band from the Isle of Wight, held the audience rapt the entire set, moving through the set as comfortable in front of a mass of 80,00 at Coachella or 2,000 on this night at the Fox Theater.
Near the end of the set, when they tore into their breakthrough, “Chaise Longue,” the room responded in kind. It felt as if everyone had been waiting for that moment – when Teasdale delivered the now-iconic “excuse me,” the crowd snapped back in violent unison, “what!” There’s a specific kind of joy in watching a band that knows exactly how far to push its own premise without breaking it. Wet Leg played that line expertly, letting songs breathe just enough before snapping them back into place. The 93-year-old Fox Theater, with its ornate interior and tight floor, amplified the sense of controlled chaos, the kind that feels one misstep away from unraveling, but never quite does. Wet Leg performs as a unit, there no band member introductions, no extended solos, with the only individual coming to the fore being Teasdale, but, even this feels as if the whole band is coming forward. It is obvious this presentation is with intent, and it’s the statement the band wants to make purposely.
If Blondshell’s set asked the audience to sit with discomfort, Wet Leg offered a way out – though not an escape so much as a reframing until the end. When the band was done with their set, it was done; there were no encores, no curtain calls. When the final note of their current hit “mangetout” rang out, that was it.
Together, the two sets traced a through line from introspection to release, from quiet confrontation to communal catharsis. It’s a pairing that shouldn’t work as cleanly as it does, but on this night, it felt almost inevitable.
By the time the lights came up, the room carried that familiar post-show residue – sweat, ringing ears, and the faint sense that something had shifted, even if only for a few hours. Not every pairing needs to make sense on paper. Sometimes, it just needs to feel right in the room.
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