This past year saw the release of possibly the most provocative song ever written about a piece of home furniture. And being on it all day long. In your underwear. For those of us who spent a good portion of time at home recently, it’s no shock that Wet Leg’s “Chaise Longue” got very popular.

With nearly 7 million streams on Spotify, it’s safe to say this song has cornered the category, with respect to Tamia’s 2015 song “Chaise Lounge.” Aside from Wet Leg reaching the number-one spot on The Current’s annual Top 89 countdown, there’s more evidence of “Chaise Longue” entering the culture. It has already been parodied at least twice: one holiday-themed and one about the omicron variant.

How and why did this happen? Put up your feet, and we’ll explain. 

A quick furniture primer 

A leisure-time staple for centuries, chaise longue is pronounced “shays long” and means “long chair” in French, according to Merriam-Webster. You see them on patios, lined up on decks of cruise ships. Sigmund Freud popularized them for psychoanalysis. More than a few stars have propped their bodies dramatically across them for photos. Here’s an infamous Seinfeld scene featuring George Costanza perched atop a chaise longue.

Although the Wet Leg song uses the French spelling, the oft-used “chaise lounge” means the same thing. “It’s a natural choice for people seeking linguistic comfort,” notes Webster’s. 

Wet whom? 

After deciding to form a band in 2018, Hester Chambers and Rhian Teasdale of Isle of Wight, United Kingdom, chose Wet Leg chose “after hitting 💦 and 🦵 on the emoji keyboard,” Teasdale told On the Wight. They wrote “Chaise Longue” pre-pandemic in 2019 at Christmas time during a sleepover at Chambers’ home, Chambers explained to The Current’s Jill Riley. “In the evenings, we'd be like, painting or watching telly, or writing silly songs together and ‘Chaise Longue’ was one of them. We don't know why it kind of stuck.” Teasdale was apparently even sitting on a chaise longue at the time of writing it. For even more on the song’s local and international rise, check out Jim McGuinn’s 2021 timeline.

Under the song’s upholstery 

Based upon anecdotal The Current listener feedback, the flirtatious fabric of “Chaise Longue” either engages or enrages. Why? For one, Teasdale repeats the title phrase 46 times in just under three-and-a-half minutes, according to The Ringer. Maybe some underwhelmed folks also thought the image of consuming warm beer backstage hit too close to home.

It’s far easier to talk about what fun the song has going for it. The same Ringer story, titled “The Eternal Cool of Talk Singing,” also aptly positions Weg Leg alongside a new generation of U.K. post-punk artists “like Dry Cleaning, Squid, Shame, Fontaines D.C., and Black Country, New Road, to name a few.” And writer Zach Schonfeld traces the phenomenon of “Sprechgesang” (talk singing, auf Deutsch) back centuries before Craig Finn purposely misplaced his first modifier.

Beyond the repetition, “Chaise Longue” is cleverly assembled. Another lyrical passage called out in many effusive blurbs about "Chaise Longue” is this one: “Is your muffin buttered? / Would you like us to assign someone to butter your muffin?” It is lifted from a lunchroom scene of the still-so-fetch 2006 Tina Fey-penned comedy Mean Girls.

Basically, Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) is approached by a doofus in the lunchroom, and is rightly taken aback when he opens his mouth. 

This awkward moment is one of Wet Leg’s many laughable encapsulations of young humans attempting to court and mate. (The line about a come-on centered around watching Buffalo 66 on DVD from their second single, “Wet Dream,” shows this is far from a one-off.) And in between acting out those adolescent rituals, we’re crassly picking apart those experiences with our friends: “I went to school and I got the big D.”

In mid-June, the world at large met Wet Leg. A press release dropped featuring the single and accompanying music video, directed by Teasdale. No chaise longues were harmed, or even appear, in the cheeky clip employing a “distinctive ‘serious hat-wearing cottage-core lady’ look.” 

Interpret it all as you’d like. Long after the deadpan lyrics elicit that initial chuckle, snicker, or knowing grin, the hooky bass, guitar, and drum keep us smashing that play button. As a reviewer covering their first U.S. performance, staged at Mercury Lounge in New York, noted: “Wet Leg are good.” Boring? Not so much. Wet Leg’s deceivingly simple style recalls the mischievous bliss of youth, and also urges us to get back out to find some more.