Wet Kiss are queens of the crashout.
It was late Tuesday night when they took the stage during Bigsound 2024. Not for an official ‘showcase’, (i.e. free industry pissup – although the trashy, faux-opulence of one of those BrisVegas clubs with the crazy LED water features actually would’ve been a perfect vibe for the band) but an unofficial show at DIY venue Season Three. It had all the gravitas of a legendary band returning from exile. Long respected as one of the best live acts in Melbourne's underground music community, Wet Kiss also share members with Tongue Dissolver and bodies of divine infinite and eternal spirit, two other brilliantly conceptual bands orbiting that local scene.
In the climatic moments of the show, frontwoman Brenna O dramatically excused herself off stage: careening, pushing through the crowd towards the bathroom at the back with a chain of exaggerated “so sorry” & “excuse me”s. The band continued with raucous crescendo, a final, over the top exclamation mark, until – like lightning Brenna shot back through the crowd out of nowhere, on stage and right on cue for the drummers’ final cymbal hit. “I had to throw up,” she said. “I’m sorry!”
Haters will say it was planned but that's hardly the point. For Wet Kiss, performance is everything – not necessarily on some “all the world’s a stage” type shit – but that the show, the moment is actually the purest realisation of self. Every part is pulled out, there, on display, exclaimed outwards to its splendidly maximal effect.
Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse bottles the thrilling, high drama of a Wet Kiss live show. It’s also, somehow, an amazing glam rock record made in 2025. And no, not like one of those ‘post punk’ records that’s literally indie rock, or ‘jazz fusion’ that is borderline elevator music. Chanteuse is the real stuff, and not just commitment to an aesthetic bit. Whilst glam rock in the past was sometimes (not always) a site for early explorations of queerness in music, Wet Kiss are able to fully realise the possibilities of its genre conventions, through their swaggering star lead Brenna O. The Broken Chanteuse herself is centre stage, with an expansive and honest representation of queer experience: everything from accidental upskirts on stage, (‘Skirt’) to the difficulties of differences in medical care across countries (‘Gender Affirmation Clinic’).
Brenna even had her very own David Bowie-exile-in-Berlin moment. But unlike Bowie, fuelled then with Nietzschean nihilism, (Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse’s title perhaps slyly referencing this, along with the track ‘Pink Shadow’ [“I couldn’t expect you would lean into right- wing thinking / Because you’re the biggest freak I’ve ever seen’]) Brenna burns bright despite life’s turmoils. Crashout in spectacular style: not with self-aggrandisement but the cheekiest of winks, and the wettest, sloppiest of kisses.
That energy pulses throughout all of Wet Kiss, and it’s what moves Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse beyond simple mid-70s pastiche. That era of Bowie still sounds so good because he was paired with such incredible, locked in musicians (also cocaine). Similarly Wet Kiss: that band member might just be playing tambourine but it’s the best f**king tambourine playing you’ve ever seen in your life. Like they’re putting their whole being into it. Watching all seven of them, often crammed tightly upon stage, shaking instruments inches from each other’s faces with joyful abandon, it all makes sense. On ‘Isn’t Music Wonderful’, they howl backup vocals, some in tune, others gleefully not. “Isn’t music wonderful? Isn’t it great?” Of course! “Isn’t it all too late?” Probably, yeah. But in that moment, on stage…
Words by Lindsay Riley