Kelly Zutrau was shy and gracious, quietly asking if Joe Valle’s drum pads could be turned up slightly near the beginning of the set; meanwhile, a handful of teenage girls took iPhone videos of themselves passionately mouthing and miming along to the words of the song “Dreams” with their backs to the stage. The performance was unassuming, in the best way; the members of Wet certainly didn’t act like they were the band that many young fans were there to worship, and that many older crowd members were there to discover.
Wet’s self-titled debut EP, released last October on Neon Gold Records, has sold 1,000 copies to date, But several figures within the music industry seem to think that Wet’s first release is the first precursor to something much bigger.
“We’re talking to a lot of people,” Zutrau cryptically tells Billboard about the Brooklyn trio’s label situation, at an East Village bar the week before the group’s Westway performance. When asked about a timetable for a label deal and the group’s future musical output, the three members of Wet chuckle under their breath about how little they can report. “Right now it’s like, ‘Just keep working until something becomes clear,'” guitarist Marty Sulkow says with a smile.
That stasis at least gives others a chance to catch up to “Wet,” a hypnotic four-song collection defined by the friction between Valle’s brisk percussion movements and Zutrau’s restrained sorrow. Wet’s debut EP was performed at a series of CMJ shows days after its release, and in late November, the group joined CHVRCHES for a string of five live shows. Collectively, the four songs on “Wet” have been streamed 928,000 times on Soundcloud.
The songs that Wet has released thus far are all “breakup songs, at least superficially,” says Zutrau, but that won’t be the case forever. The threesome has been practicing and recording all day in Brooklyn — preparing for the many live shows and debut album that will both inevitably come
The three members of Wet met while Sulkow and Valle attended NYU and Zutrau was a student at Cooper Union in New York, and the trio began making music casually. When Zutrau moved to Providence to attend the Rhode Island School of Design and Valle headed to Los Angeles for a brief period, the three continued to email each other unfinished tracks, and when they reconvened in New York in mid-2012, passing songs back and forth turned into seriously focusing on a handful of tracks.
Zutrau had been performing in musicals since she was a kid — she laughs through a story of singing in a production of “Big” when she was 13 and telling her family that she would be on Broadway when she was 20. Eventually, her musical interests shifted to 90’s R&B, which she nods to in most of Wet’s songs;
Wet started posting demos on Bandcamp as long ago as 2013 . Following the EP release and the resulting rise of touring opportunities (Wet is represented by the Windish Agency), the group was finally able to give up its non-musical jobs and start hunkering down on the project.
The singer promises that some sort of new music from the band is coming “really soon,” and adds that Wet was recently joined by Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly in the studio. Two more New York shows, at Rough Trade and at the Mercury Lounge will lead into South by Southwest, and the band will also perform at the U.K.’s Great Escape festival in May 2016.
The Fat Angel Sings 