WET MARKET: RECLAIMING THE GAZE WITH ‘RED LANTERN’

When a lineup like this forms, you pay attention. Wet Market bring together an unlikely yet magnetic supergroup of British ESEA (East and Southeast Asian) musicians — Matt Tong (ex-Bloc Party, Algiers), Jojo Khor (GHUM), Ed Riman (Hilang Child), and Helen Ganya — who first connected through the UK’s ESEA Music community. Their debut single, ‘Red Lantern’, released via ESEA Sounds, is a riotous blend of post-punk tension, industrial energy, and sardonic pop melody — a song that tears into the exoticising, orientalist gaze with biting humour and defiant charm.

The band’s very name, Wet Market, is a bold reclamation — a nod to pandemic-era scapegoating and the anti-Asian sentiment that shaped their shared context. Beneath the noise and chaos, though, lies a striking sense of solidarity and creative freedom.

We caught up with Matt Tong and Ed Riman to talk about how the group came together, the collaborative process behind ‘Red Lantern’, and what’s next for this ever-evolving collective.

How did this supergroup come together, and what drew you all to collaborate on ‘Red Lantern’?

Matt Tong: We all met at the 2023 edition of SXSW, having become acquainted with each other on the ESEA Music group chat. There was one night where I watched Ed fill in on drums for Jojo’s band, GHUM, and then he played drums with Helen during her set afterwards. The man’s a machine. He’ll play on anything. He’s taken all my jobs so I thought I’d try and get him to play in a band with me, Helen and Jojo, but then he insisted on me playing drums as well. So now we have two drummers and two guitarists but no bass. Hmm.

How did you navigate blending industrial pulse, post-punk tension, and spoken-word grit into a cohesive track?

Matt Tong: Jojo shared a very compelling and complete sounding demo for this one. It came together pretty fluidly, she was in New York, where I live, for a minute so we jammed our bits out in a rehearsal room and then emailed it to Helen and Ed. Helen wrote the outro spoken word vocal first and then Ed came round hers and then they wrote the vocal for the first half of the song. I think the distance means we’re somewhat relieved of the pressure to have an immediate opinion on someone’s idea, which means we can sleep on something. An idea that doesn’t always make sense often does once you’ve slept on it. And if it still doesn’t after that, then it’s not much of an effort to dispense with it. But with the distance, I think sometimes you can be a bit more intuitive when it doesn’t feel like you’ve got the entire rest of the band breathing on your neck.

Ed Riman: I’d also add that we never set out to specifically create something that blends genres in that way. I think just naturally as we’re four people with four quite different musical skill sets, the way we went about writing this song gave each person the time and space to be themselves in the creative process, which I think is how it’s become so beautifully genre-bending.

The name Wet Market is a provocative nod to anti-Asian hate and pandemic-era scapegoating. Can you share more about why you chose this name and what it represents for the band and your communities?

Matt Tong: It just popped into my head and I fired it off whilst we were trying to come up with a band name under some duress. I’m terrible at band names: my idea for Bloc Party was “The Daily Mail”. Imagine my surprise when Jojo thought “Wet Market” was hilarious. For me, the name was an attempt to poke through some of the po-faced pontificating people assume you’re adopting when you’re trying to advocate for yourself. But it contains different layers of meaning and mine certainly isn’t supposed to be the dominant one.

‘Red Lantern’ explores ideas like the orientalist gaze and the fetishisation of Asian identity. What inspired these themes, and how do you hope listeners engage with them?

Ed Riman: Helen came up with a concept about fetishization — how she and the rest of us at certain points have experienced that in terms of being Asian, or part-Asian. From there, we took it in turns to write lyrics that fit with the theme.

Helen Ganya: It’s this idea of how you're being perceived – that old Hollywood idea of the East; neon lights, bright colours, everyone’s part of a gang in Chinatown. But it’s kind of owning that gaze and being a bit tongue in cheek about it at the same time. It's not ‘woe is me’ or anything like that, it was being like: if this is what you want us to do, then we'll do it.

Matt Tong: It’s making peace with misrepresentation.

This debut single is just the beginning. What can fans expect next from Wet Market, and how do you see the band evolving musically and thematically?

Ed Riman: We’ve got stacks of other demos and ideas that we’ve been bouncing across to each other in the same way we did for Red Lantern, so we’ll be getting our teeth into those. We’ve also got our debut live show in February, so that’ll be a bit of a mammoth process working out how to make this all work live, but I’m excited for it. I need to work out how the hell I’m gonna sing those harmonies with Helen while simultaneously having a drum battle with Matt.