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Letter Blue is Wet’s third album, guided as always by the New York three-piece’s magnetic singer-songwriter Kelly Zutrau. But this is also Wet’s most collaborative release, with co-writing and co-production from Toro y Moi’s Chaz Bear, as well as Frank Ocean’s go-to keyboardist Buddy Ross. Notably, founding guitarist Marty Sulkow has rejoined the group, alongside their nimble producer Joe Valle. Altogether, they’ve helped to create Wet’s most natural-feeling and playful songs to date.
“We were circling back to the beginning,” Zutrau says, “when it was fun and intuitive and friends working on music, and how sweet that was.”
“Collaboration has always been an integral part of the best Wet songs, so it’s been both comforting and exciting to all be working together again and to embrace the many voices that have become essential to our process along the way.” Joe Valle
Wet released their self-titled debut EP in 2014, for the taste-making pop label Neon Gold, before moving to Columbia Records for two understated, celebrated albums, Don’t You (2016) and Still Run (2018). “Wet has what it takes to make everyone care about an indie band,” FADER announced in a glowing magazine profile before the band went on to play Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and sell out Webster Hall. They’ve toured with The 1975, Florence + the Machine, and Toro Y Moi, who also featured Wet on 2019’s Outer Peace.
Letter Blue is Wet’s first album via AWAL. It’s full of modern love songs, plainspoken yet emotionally complex, with any insecurity still delivered with clear conviction. Clearly created in a spirit of brightness and improvisation, Letter Blue finds them moving with a gentle touch across multiple styles, from poppy country to R&B and even vibey soft rock. The feelings are very fluid: “You don’t know whether to applaud or cry,” Rolling Stone once said about Wet.
“I’m always interested in multiple feelings at once,” Zutrau says. “Not just a happy song, but happy and sad and guilty — those can all be true.” This is as much a sonic statement as it is one about life: “We see these messages in music and media that are very black and white, but our lives don’t really live up to those expectations. Instead, we’re somewhere in the middle of all these states that are much easier to explain.”
LUCY (Cooper B. Handy)
While still in high school, Cooper Handy, of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, started a Facebook page called “lucy” for the sake of anonymity in sharing his music. Most of what appeared here was distant from what “Lucy” would come to represent in the years since, but it was a fitting, could-only-exist-online start for a project that would soon be turning heads. As Lucy, lucy, LUCY, lucyboy, or L U C Y (depending on where you listen) Handy has picked and chosen elements from a wide array of genres to make a sound that is at once ‘outsider’ and unpretentious. The result is exciting, raw, and triumphant music from an artist who has made a career of producing & self-releasing videos and music, unpolished & posted in near-real time.
The plainspokenness of Lucy’s lyrics and the unassuming character of his production inspire a curiosity in his fans and first-time listeners alike—as, despite this straightforwardness, there is undeniably something else going on. Handy is an enigma without the cold-shoulder of mystique. His lyrics spin the sense out of common sense while remaining frank and conversational—his instrumentation clips and distorts but keeps sight of itself as if being a four-piece band. Lucy performs a playfully romantic take on pop music, singing, “too smart to argue or to judge, you know me, I only want to love” (2016), or, “match made in heaven, strike anywhere match” (2017). His music may come out of left field, but it is also immediately familiar. It is the best result of mixing artistic ingenuity with down-to-earth deftness
When asked about his musical background, Handy remembers loving the perceived ‘authenticity’ of early-aughts pop-punk (an interest that traces back to an earlier infatuation with The Clash). This fandom made him realize that he, too, could make music. Since moving from home on the Cape to Hadley, Massachusetts, the practice of music-making has shared with these early influences the pursuit of authenticity and the embrace of the pop-song form. The lessons gleaned from his tastes in earlier years were a humbling realism and a commitment to heartfelt communication. However, as with most of his musical influences, Handy incorporates the feeling and the culture of any given music without hijacking its timbres or other typical signifiers of genre. This keeps his performance grounded and accessible while his material is wildly creative and often experimental.