Wet Kiss Unveil Gloriously Chaotic Clip For 'Isn't Music Wonderful'; Thus Spoke The Broken Chanteuse LP Out June 27

Naarm/Melbourne antic glam rock group Wet Kiss unveil a gloriously chaotic clip to accompany new single ‘Isn’t Music Wonderful, the lead track from their sophomore album Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse, out Friday, June 27 via Dinosaur City. Watch 'Isn't Music Wonderful'. Pre-order Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse on limited-edition 12" vinyl.

‘Isn't Music Wonderful’, is perhaps the records’ best distillation of the band’s sly, stylish lunacy. The song title is yelped in earnest, but is frontwoman Brenna O 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.

For its accompanying clip, Brenna sought out Sam Eidelson of Naarm group Kisses, the dynamic between the two immediately set: Brenna O, the muse; Eidelson, the visionary director. Eidelson was clearly up for the task, promptly birthing brat pictures, turning Wet Kiss into the movie stars they were always destined to be. Sam’s vision for the clip was informed entirely by performance and play. He shares, “I felt that it was in the spirit of the song and the band to spend the limited budget on a gold limo and champagne rather than film gear and crew.”

Shoot day was fueled by drinks, dr*gs, cigs – “anything to loosen us up for the camera”. The band was ejected from her apartment building foyer before filming commenced, Brenna O diving into a moving gold limo while lip-synching the song’s opening lines.

In an on-brand but entirely unexpected pandemonium, the limo was involved in a crash and destroyed, Eidelson turning what some might consider a crisis into a theatrical masterpiece that would cost a film crew tens of thousands of dollars to execute. Some of the scenes are entirely authentic, others officially staged, and a few that live between the two, forming a fever dream of voyeuristic imagery that exists between reality and fantasy.

"When am I gonna be a star?", Brenna spits on the opening line of ‘Isn’t Music Wonderful’, but the clip’s closing footage – featuring Wet Kiss performing the new number to a full, frenzied room at The Tote for its launch last month – is irrefutable evidence that she already is.

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.

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 She’s So Cool, 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 about Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse.

Catapulting onto the live music scene with the release of their debut album She’s So Cool via Dero Arcade (cumgirl8, Divide & Dissolve) Wet Kiss have built a dedicated following through word-of-mouth and their righteous live shows. In between support stages with Amyl & the Sniffers, RVG, Bar Italia, HTRK and CIVIC, the group scored a slot on the inaugural Eighty-Six Festival’s Super Saturday, RISING’s sold-out Day Tripper event and showcased at SXSW Sydney, with headline tours across Australia’s east coast, Europe and the UK.

Dunk yourself in Wet Kiss’ filthy, lavish depths when they perform a headline set at The Curtin on Friday, May 9, 2025.

Upcoming shows: Friday, March 9 – The Corner Hotel, Carlton, VIC

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