Wet Leg: Strange Fascination

Much has changed for Wet Leg since Chaise Longue catapulted Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers to indie omnipresence, but as their second album proves, the band’s knack for mining the peculiarities of everyday life – and love – remains firmly intact

Wet Leg were never supposed to be on the cover of magazines. When Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers started a band, they had neither hope nor expectation. In fact, the whole thing was a joke – until, very quickly, it wasn’t. “I was really scared recording the first album,” Teasdale says. “I can hear it in my voice. I can remember exactly how I felt.” 

And so, in a west London pub garden, Teasdale, shy in the sunshine, speaks with a bemused and baffled quality about the success of Wet Leg. She looks otherworldly, with bleached hair and eyebrows, sunlight glinting from her silver jewellery. It’s a new look for her; bolder and more subversive. Teasdale no longer reads as your typical indie frontwoman; gone are the messy fringe and cottagecore dresses, replaced by a visual language that is sharper and more intentional. She is joined by a plaid-shirted Josh Mobaraki, Wet Leg’s guitarist, who she frequently brings into the conversation, half-answering a question and then grinning in his direction to finish. 

Teasdale’s appearance isn’t the only change in the world of Wet Leg. After a whirlwind ascent that saw them dominating festival stages and sweeping up awards along the way, the band are back with a new album, Moisturizer, that strikes an altogether more abrasive sound than their 2022 debut. The post-punk influences are dialled up, with less of the ironic detachment that lent debut Wet Leg a sense of playful ambivalence. Moisturizer, it turns out, is even hornier too. Case in point: Pillow Talk, where Teasdale sneers, “Every night I lick my pillow I wish I was licking you/ Every night I fuck my pillow I wish I was fucking you,” over a coarse beat that flirts with industrial rock. “I like this in bed, and I like this in bed… God, I forgot I’d have to do interviews about it,” squirms Teasdale.

The band has also expanded – not just in sound, but in spirit. Having been on the road for three years, Teasdale and Chambers no longer felt like the sole custodians of Wet Leg, and the desire to capture the energy of their riotous and singular live shows drove the decision to write the second album with the full band. “It would be weird if me and Hester were like, ‘OK, we’re just going to go off and write the album now, we’ll get you back to play it,’” teases Teasdale. “Maybe we should have done that,” she adds, eyeballing Mobaraki, who has toured with the band since the beginning and helped write Chaise Longue.

With the help of Fontaines D.C. and Black Midi producer Dan Carey, Moisturizer was written in a rental in the quintessential British seaside town of Southwold, Suffolk, last March. It marked a chance to take a breath and reconfigure after the fever dream of the preceding years. “It was the first moment we all got to be still together,” Teasdale says. “This crazy roller coaster dreamland thing we’ve been on – this weird trip that is definitely gonna run out. Suddenly it was like, ‘Oh, we’re at the beginning of something. We’re allowed to make another one?! This is our job? To be self-indulgent and write songs?’ It was a monumental moment. Not the Grammys, not the Brits – Southwold.”

By day, Teasdale and Chambers penned lyrics from an office made out of a “decommissioned tram” in the garden, while the rest of the extended band – Mobaraki, Henry Holmes on drums and Ellis Durand on bass – worked on the instrumentals. By night, they watched horror films – one track is named after the Megan Fox and Adam Brody cult classic, Jennifer’s Body. 

For Teasdale, writing carries the same uneasy charge as a horror film, weaving dark, risky lyrics through raging guitars and angular basslines. “We all egg each other on. I’ll be like, ‘Can I say this? Is this a bit off?’ and they all say, ‘Yes, we love that lyric!’” She looks to Mobaraki, who adds, “There might be an expectation that this time around, everyone’s watching us – that we have to do it properly and play it safe. But actually, it’s a really good thing to feel like you’re pushing it.” Their second album, then, displays the same grasp of the uncanny that saw Teasdale and Chambers invite morris dancing troupe Boss Morris to join them on stage at the 2023 Brit Awards. During their performance of Catch These Fists on The Tonight Show, Teasdale is ready for the fight in mutated boxing gloves, a leering smile flickering across her face as she stalks the stage, bringing a more sinister Wet Leg iteration to life. 

Speaking to Wet Leg, you get the sense that they can’t quite believe their luck, and that they’re determined to make the most of it before the jig is up. Moisturizer may be their chance to take things more seriously, but they’re also leaning into the jump scares. The first promo image the band shared to announce their return in March shows them on a sofa arranged like a family portrait – only the sofa is full of stuffed animals, and an unknown man dressed as a goblin sits in the middle of Teasdale and Chambers. It’s a scene that could have been shot by Gregory Crewdson – domestic and mundane, yet with something quietly off humming beneath the surface. “Everyone asks, ‘Why the goblin? Why is there a goblin in the new press shot?’” Teasdale says. “I try really hard to intellectualise it, but I don’t know, we just wanted to torment our friend and make him sit in prosthetics for six hours.”

Informing their outsider sensibility, perhaps, is the fact that Teasdale and Chambers hail from the Isle of Wight – a sleepy island off England’s south coast known for its cycle tracks, haunted locations and faintly whimsical charm. “I hate going back there,” says Teasdale, who now lives in London. “I associate going back with the feeling of being trapped. It’s the small town thing, then you add a body of water that costs £20 to cross.” And yet, despite her disdain for the place, most of the band’s videos are shot there, and Chambers and Mobaraki still live on the island. Indeed, it remains integral to Wet Leg’s DNA. It has given them an innate understanding of forgotten parochial England, inspiring lyrics that reference Strongbow Dark Fruit and jokes about encountering a “washed-up” sleaze on a night out who should “call the RNLI”. It’s worth noting, too, that Teasdale once worked at the vast Robin Hill adventure park, dressing up in a giant bird costume – a peculiar image that continues to seep into the band’s aesthetic.

When Teasdale met guitarist Chambers at music college in the county town of Newport, both had already been performing for years – Chambers in a band, Teasdale as a solo artist. In 2019, they decided to start something together, purely for fun. Both had given up on ever making a career out of music; naming themselves Wet Leg is testament to how seriously they were taking things. By the end of 2020, however, they’d signed to Domino Records with only four songs, among them the deliriously catchy Chaise Longue, with its Mean Girls reference (“Would you like us to assign someone to butter your muffin?”) and an almost irreconcilable post-punk riff. 

A self-titled debut album followed in the spring of 2022 – a sharp, surreal cocktail of deadpan humour and modern malaise, calling out soft boys and lamenting over doom-scrolling and social anxiety at parties. Much like a nihilistic meme, songs like Too Late Now (“I’m not sure if this is a song/ I don’t even know what I’m saying/ Everything is going wrong”) captured a prevailing sense of apathy among young people – an emotional backdrop shaped by endless wars, economic instability and the feeling of sleepwalking into climate armageddon. Through the snide humour of Piece of Shit (“You’re like a piece of shit, you either sink or float”) and Ur Mum (“When I think about what you’ve become/ I feel sorry for your mum”), Wet Leg straddled the line between ridiculous and relatable. They distilled modern anxieties into songs that made each other laugh and were fun to perform live – written for themselves, but gaining a cultish following in the process.

While much of their debut centred around snide takes and fuckboy takedowns, Moisturizer sees them embrace newfound vulnerability – albeit with their signature surrealism intact. Album opener CPR is an urgent siren blast of a song about falling for someone – ostensibly a good thing – but Teasdale hones in on the horror: the visceral chaos of emotions, the agony and overwhelm of having to contain strong feelings paired with the dread of not knowing if the other person feels the same. “Is it love or suicide?” she drawls.

While Catch These Fists decries sleazy advances, the majority of the record is altogether more loved up, with few details spared. Pillow Talk is a lustful fantasy about someone you know enough to fancy, but haven’t yet discovered a single annoying habit; Liquidize, a 2000s indie-sounding gem, goes hard on the gooiness (“So many creatures in the fucking world, how could I be your one? Be your marshmallow worm?”). U and Me at Home and Davina McCall explore the beautiful banality of long-term relationships.