Wet is poised for success.
There’s a fair chance you may
have heard at least one of the
band’s lush recordings from
their self-titled EP - they’re all
over 8tracks, SoundCloud, and
retail in-store playlists.
Multiple DJ’s have remixed their tracks, blasting them through subwoofers to their crowd-filled festival sets. Sparse, emotive
and filled with harmonies, the Wet EP conjures up feelings of heartbreak and longing, with a very distinct sound. Their debut
album Don’t You was released January of this year, after a long road of inspiration, touring and recording. In this exclusive
Chloe interview, band member Joe Valle talks all about the music.
How did you guys get together as a band?
We all met through different mutual friends as students in
downtown NYC. We started playing music casually at first, but
it wasn’t until after college in the summer of 2012 when we were
all back living in NYC again that we started to take it seriously.
Being based in Brooklyn, how has that location influenced
your sound and music?
I think it’s the community in New York that is more of an influence on the music than the location itself. There have definitely
been periods of time when New York as a location has exerted
a heavy influence on the music created there — I’m thinking
specifically of New York punk in the 70’s — but I don’t think
that’s necessarily the case these days. However, by the time we
had started Wet, we had been living in New York for the better
part of 10 years and already knew a lot of people in the indie
music scene — bands, promoters, labels, etc. — so it was a lot
easier for us to book shows and get things going.
How did you figure out the sound of Wet? Was it a collaborative effort between the three of you, or a unanimous decision?
As trivial as that seems, I think in some ways it speaks to our
sound and overall aesthetic. We’ve been described a lot as
“synth-pop” or “electro-pop” or “R&B” and while I accept that
those are recognizable components of our overall sound, they
seem to me to be limiting and in some ways misleading descriptors of the music. The three of us have widely varying tastes
in music, but over the course of making this album, it became
clear what a Wet song sounds like. So yes, it was more or less
a collaborative effort that came out of experimentation and a
learning-by-doing attitude, but there was no stylistic North Star
by which we navigated this process. While 90’s R&B might be a
stylistic touchstone, we don’t want to be confined to that or any
other current trend. I think the most productive umbrella term
for our music and a lot of other genre-blending acts of the moment — Grimes, Chairlift, The xx — would be “contemporary
pop” because it allows the listener to tease out the influences
rather than imposing them on the music.