Rising Naarm/Melbourne glam-rock group, Wet Kiss, have released their highly anticipated sophomore album Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse, via Dinosaur City.
Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse, the antic glam-rock group’s second record, 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.”
What is she saying? Well, a few things. Produced by Andy 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 oestrogen. 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), Al Amour (piano), Ben Addiction (bass), Ju Sugar (lead guitar), Ruby Rabbit (drums) and Agnes Wailin’ (dubbed ‘Screamin’’ for their tenacious vocal belts). The band quickly moved in together, put out their beguiling debut record She’s So Cool, and 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.
The first single off Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse, ‘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 nights 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.
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. ‘Chick from Nowhere’ is a janky piano ballad (of pianist Aldo, Brenna affectionately calls them the “Barry Manilow to my Bette Midler”), that descends into a full-blown rock opera, about picking up lovers in the early morning, relishing the freedom of being an unknown entity in an unknown city. The melody was written back in Melbourne, the band high on ecstasy and suddenly eager to write a really tight pop song. “It’s not really a standard pop song at all” laughs Brenna, “it’s more of a rock saloon song.”
A couple of the album tracks deal with disastrous, yet funny and formative, gig mishaps abroad. ‘Skirt’ is a 70s rock anthem by way of 90s PJ Harvey, laden with whoof whistle samples, serving as a retort to leering audience members but also poking fun at Brenna’s on-stage humiliation (“Girls get paid in fascination / even while the night gets wasted”). She had just moved to Berlin and was playing her first solo set, but the show didn’t pan out as planned. “I got really drunk on white wine and it was a disaster. I luckily saved it by bantering. I had my foot up on the amp the whole time, and after the set my friend was like, ‘Oh my God, everyone was trying to peer up your skirt.” ‘Pink Shadow’ is grimy punk burlesque, about the convergence of taking hormones for the first time and trying to insert yourself in a new music scene. “It’s about intertwining the mythos of myself and the mythos of the city,” says Brenna.
Elsewhere on the record, Wet Kiss are inserting themselves into lineages, old and new. The speedy punk of ‘Metal Silhouette’ toys with Burroughs’ cut-up method, the drawl of ‘Gender Affirmation Clinic,’ sounds like something you might find on David Bowie’s Space Oddity record. ‘Babe’ is a sauntering, lovestruck cover of the underappreciated folk song by artist Rick Penta. ‘The Gay Band’ is sweet glam magic, a glimmering anthem with lip-smacking vocals, about the death of friends and the metaphorical death of an old self. “I want to carry on that spirit of dirty street decadence, but also the great tradition of self-invention,” says Brenna about the album.
Release: June 27th, 2025, Dinosaur City Records
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