Wet Kiss Share 'Isn't Music Wonderful' Ahead Of Golden Plains Debut; Sophomore LP Out June 27 Via Dinosaur City

[Friday, 28 February, Naarm / Melbourne] Naarm/Melbourne queer antic glam rock group Wet Kiss are back, sharing their first new music since 2022’s She’s So Cool with ‘Isn’t Music Wonderful’. The new release comes alongside the announcement of their highly-awaited sophomore album – and their first for Dinosaur City – Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse, out Friday, June 27. Listen to ‘Isn’t Music Wonderful’ HERE. Pre-order Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse HERE

Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse is exactly what the title suggests. Our chanteuse here is the sensational jezebel Brenna O: Part Factory Girl, part Fassbinder heroine, all peroxide locks and shiny, skin-tight “$2 dresses”, sneering and growling across the stage, mixing greasy punk with cabaret excess. Or as she likes to put it: “the punk Bette Midler is here.” What is she saying? Well, a few things. Produced by Andrew Huhtanen McEwan, Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse is about the grubby pleasures of hopping on the Melbourne-to-Berlin artist pipeline. It’s about “daddy at the abattoir,” slaughtering piggies. It’s about gloomy waits at the gender clinic so you can get your estrogen. It’s about dingy, crap clubs, desolate glamour, strutting down the street with your dignity in tatters, upskirting, indulgence and the glory of turning fantasy into reality. The album name is also something of a joke, melding a music journalist’s snide comment about the band (“broken chanteuse”) with a nod to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

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New single 'Isn't Music Wonderful’, is perhaps the best distillation of the band’s sly, stylish lunacy. The song title is yelped in earnest, but is Brenna taking the piss? Music is wonderful — it shoves misfits together, it makes life worth living, it is a fleeting, euphoric high, hard to replicate chemically. But to be a musician is also a pain in the ass, where getting your dues is a long and tortuous path (“When am I gonna be a star? / I’m searching in my bag for last night's drag”, as Brenna sings). Nothing left to do except nurture dreams and delusions, and smack make-shift opulence onto every surface you can. The song is pure glam bombast: layers of honky-tonk piano, jeering back-up singers and Brenna hissing street-wise bon mots. “It’s about needing to self-actualise. The verses are all about that necessary posturing and self-deprecation,” says Brenna.

The story of Wet Kiss is the story of myth-turned-real. Brenna knew what she wanted: glam-rock mutated for the adderall age – she just needed to find the players. So she put out ads in local rock magazines and found them: Daniel Dog (guitar), Aldo Thomas (piano), Ben Sendy-Smithers (Bass), Ju Shung (Lead Guitar), Ruby Rabbit (drums) and Agnes Whalen (backing vocals). The band quickly moved in together, quickly put out their beguiling debut record, and quickly built a live reputation. Their performances left crowds gobsmacked: there were floppy bunny ears and buckets of sweat; costume changes and clothes ripped to smithereens; ecstatic howls and hilarious antagonism.

Plenty of Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse is brimming with this tension — between the hedonistic triumph of inventing oneself, and the dreary texture of modern life. Brenna became well acquainted with this conflict during a long stint in Berlin. Much of the record was written there, and as such, many of the songs are slathered in a thick glob of Weimar decadence. “I want to carry on that spirit of dirty street decadence, but also the great tradition of self-invention,” says Brenna.

"When am I gonna be a star?," Brenna asks in the opening line of Wet Kiss' new single, but the answer feels imminent (and fans of the band would attest that she already is). Since their 2022 debut, She's So Cool, released via Dero Arcade (Divide & Dissolve, cumgirl8), they've been on an upwards trajectory, supporting big bands like Amyl & the Sniffers, Bar Italia, RGV and CIVIC, commanding festival stages at The Eighty-Six and RISING, and showcasing at SXSW Sydney. Catch them at The Tote this Friday, and at Golden Plains next weekend. You can watch back on their unofficial BIGSOUND showcase at Season Three in September HERE.

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