Wet Leg tackle unsafe spaces: the gig that inspired ‘Catch These Fists’

Posted On July 1, 2025July 1, 2025

Wet Leg are at the peak of their powers. After years battling against labels like “industry plant”, the band seems more poised than ever to hit back at some of their biggest critics with a new fervour that thoroughly equips them for battle. Aside from the obvious physical manifestations of this new attitude, like band lead Rhian Teasdale wearing boxing gloves during performances, there’s also something peering from deeper beneath the surface, a red-hot iron rod that calls out deep-seated toxicity.

One of the biggest differences looking at Wet Leg now isn’t the way the dynamic seems to have shifted, or how they’re leaning more heavily into post-punk influences than ever before, but how much they’re celebrating their own whimsical world. There was a lot of this the first time around, of course, but this time it comes with a more distinctive edge, the kind that takes the abstract for what it is without caring about whether it even makes sense to anybody else or not.

For instance, you might think they’d be looking to extend their appeal and hit other audiences they didn’t hit with their debut or accompanying run, but it seems they’ve only been interested in leaning into the specificity of their offering, naming songs after television hosts only British audiences will be familiar with and playing with the kind of experimentalism that only serves to push them further into a more well-established niche. In many ways, this is entirely fitting and speaks to a band who don’t give a crap about how they’re perceived. But it also proves that they’re truly here for the fight, even if it means revealing some of the darker parts of the industry.

‘Catch These Fists’ was the first glimpse at this new iteration of Wet Leg, a defiant pivot from the dreamlike and wayward quality of previous tracks like ‘Wet Dream’ and ‘Ur Mum’ that turned a piercing eye to people you meet late at night who are only out to make you feel uncomfortable. It’s a common occurrence for most women the moment they leave their house, a lingering shadow in the back of the mind that quashes the potential for feeling unsafe when there’s nothing to suggest any justification for the sense of foreboding.

Wet Leg punch back with purpose

But it’s all in the track record; in the nights out when things suddenly take a turn, when one or more people decide it’s acceptable to create an atmosphere that’s as sour as the cider on tap. The moment that takes the harmless warmth of a nice environment and pours cold water all over it, like the ice bucket challenge if the bucket was a group of unsuspecting predators. This moment is the exact moment that inspired ‘Catch These Fists’, after Teasdale attended Chappell Roan’s Brixton Academy gig and went down the road to a bar where the atmosphere was, well, a little different.

“Me and my friends went to Chappell Roan’s gig at Brixton Academy, and it was amazing,” Teasdale told Jack Saunders during a BBC Radio 1 interview. “And like everyone else in the crowd was just like, so lovely, and it’s just like a very like safe space. And then afterwards, we went to a bar down the road, and just that kind of like ecstatic safe space feeling just completely dissolved as soon as we, like, set foot in this bar. So it was after that.”

Naturally, this frustration bleeds through in the track’s lyrics, when Teasdale signals a warning against anyone whose behaviour ventures into the unacceptable. “You should be careful, do you catch my drift? ‘Cause what I really wanna know is can you catch these fists?” She half-sings, her tone poised and quiet yet cutting, like the sinister undertone in the following verse, “He don’t get puss, he get the boot / I saw him sipping on dark fruit / This always happens late at night / Some guy comes up, says I’m his type / I just threw up in my mouth / When he just tried to ask me out.”

This factors into Wet Leg’s current reign, with Teasdale and the rest of the band rising like a force to be reckoned with, a far cry from the delicacy of their earlier aesthetic where these criticisms were usually cushioned by a knowing wink, or an awkward positioning in front of the camera, when it seemed their abstraction was more a statement against meaningless over-polishing than anything that went deeper beneath the surface of music industry culture. This time, their power is more prominent, like a warning label that wards off all sleazeball types who think they’ve any business approaching a pure stranger.

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