Wet Kiss - Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse (2025) Hi-Res

‘Thus Spoke The Broken Chanteuse’, the new album from rising punk group, Wet Kiss, is out now across digital music platforms and on limited-edition 12” vinyl via Dinosaur City Records.

‘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 is here.” 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 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), 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, 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.

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.

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.

Wet Kiss catapulted onto the scene with the release of their debut album ‘She’s So Cool’ via Dero Arcade (cumgirl8, Divide & Dissolve) in 2022. In a somewhat shock move, Olver and daniel dog relocated to Berlin just a month after the album dropped. When plans of their 2024 return became public (alongside whispers of a new record), a frenzy was ignited with fans and media alike. In the nine months since, Wet Kiss have played Melbourne Town Hall for RISING’s sold-out DAY TRIPPER festival alongside Bar Italia and HTRK, showcased at SXSW Sydney and made their ‘Sup debut for Golden Plains alongside PJ Harvey and Fontaines D.C. On top of that, they’ve scored support slots with Amyl & the Sniffers, RVG, Spike F*ck, CIVIC, Floodlights and Private Function. This momentum has been bolstered by critical acclaim from influential outlets like Bandcamp, Beat Magazine, Rolling Stone, Gusher Magazine, BBC 6, WFMU, 3RRR, PBS and fbi.radio, among others.