From The Rolling Stones to Robert Palmer, love as a medical emergency is a perennial theme for songwriters. Well, sound the alarm and send out the paramedics once again, because Wet Leg are in love. It’s all over their second album, but explicitly ringing out as a klaxon call on current single “CPR”. “Hello 999, what’s your emergency?” asks Rhian Teasdale with call handler calm before making her orgasmic self-diagnosis: “I…I…I…I…I…I’m in love.” And when Teasdale sings she’s in love, you’d best believe she’s in love, however you want to spell it.
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It’s quite the turnaround. Debut album Wet Leg was written post-break-up, its sass and snark enabling a playfully scornful catharsis. Most of the songs had been concocted purely for the amusement of Teasdale and fellow founder Hester Chambers, a sort of knockabout therapy. But the release of debut single “Chaise Longue” in the summer of 2021 changed everything. Wet Leg became an old-school overnight sensation, as the world beyond their Isle of Wight home – an unexpected cultural ground zero, notwithstanding its festival history – fell bigtime for the song’s singular wit, louche hookline and deadpan call-and-response on buttered muffins and the like.
Teasdale and Chambers were carried along in its giddy slipstream all the way to the Brits, then onwards to scoop two Grammys, an Ivor Novello Award and score highly in Uncut’s Albums of the Year list. Through the rush of acclaim and surprise commercial success, the words of their third single “Too Late Now” resonated: “I’m not sure if this is the kind of life that I saw myself living.”
Two years of diligent touring, including zipping around the Antipodes supporting Harry Styles, laid the groundwork for that life. Some bands would have cracked; Wet Leg consolidated, and now identify as a five-piece with touring guitarist Joshua Mobaraki, bassist Ellis Durand and drummer Henry Holmes all firmly in the fold (plus producer Dan Carey an honorary sixth Leg on Swarmatron duties).
It turns out Teasdale and Chambers were fibbing back in 2022 when they said they had already completed their second album: instead Moisturizer sprang to life when the group rented an Airbnb in Southwold, Suffolk, a writers’ retreat in which to work by day, then hang out and watch horror films by night. This was the Wet Leg equivalent of Bon Iver’s cabin in the woods, a place to vanquish the pressure of expectation and home in on their own musical desires. They have dubbed this hermetic world “Moisturizer Valley”. According to Teasdale, it’s “a space somewhere between fantasy and reality” with a punk White Lotus aesthetic captured in the video for the album’s first single “Catch These Fists”. The song is a cranky kick-ass response to unwanted male attention, with Teasdale lumbering up and limboing down for a night out with trouble in store: “Limousine/Racking up/Ketamine/Giddy up/Man down/Level up”. It’s a cold shoulder in haiku style, soundtracked by a curt, clanking guitar line, a sonic disruption to send the unlucky suitor home with a flea in his ear: “He don’t get puss, he get the boot.”
We’re a long way from the self-comforting group hug of the Wet Leg sleeve. Instead, the talons are out on the somewhat disturbing album cover shot by Iris Luz, with Chambers and Teasdale presenting like ghoulish characters from a Hideo Nakata J-horror. It’s just one demonstration of the take-it-or-leave-it confidence threaded throughout Moisturizer, one of its strongest cards alongside a refreshed sound palette that relishes the ferocious dynamics of riot grrrl, freely indulges in outbreaks of garage rock and detours into Tame Impala-like, neon-lit grooves.
The album opens with their emergency callout “CPR”, capturing heady, unsettling confusion in the line “is it love or is it suicide?” The hounds of love are in pursuit but instead of throwing her shoes in the lake, she’s leaping off the precipice. Meanwhile, the rest of the band are laying down a lithe, bendy bassline, punctuated with bursts of grungey guitar en route to the song’s clamorous climax.
The bells and whistles subside but Teasdale is still disorientated by her treatment on “Liquidise”, as she outlines turning to jelly at the thought of her condition (“so many creatures in the fucking world/How did I get to be so lucky?”) and rides the choppy waves of guitar by alternating between deadpan staccato delivery and sweeter legato tones.
Elsewhere, the band emulate something close to relaxed rapture, or at least contentment on “Davina McCall”, a laidback paean to resting easy in a relationship with a lyric inspired by McCall’s Big Brother catchphrase “I’m coming to get you”. As it happens, McCall is already a confirmed Wet Leg fan and delighted by her namecheck. Shakira, meanwhile, has yet to comment on the line “I’ll be your Shakira, whenever, wherever”.
In addition to her curveball cultural comparisons, Teasdale embraces romantic cliché – battling through storms, never wanting to wake up from the dream, not noticing crummy weather because time spent with her love means eternal sunshine – but she’s still deep in reverie on the goth-tinged “Jennifer’s Body”, oscillating between shy understatement (“I like you”) and more daring gender-fluid gestures (“want a man?/I’ll pretend for you”). Teasdale has spoken about the liberation she has found in embracing her queerness and shrugging off the male gaze. So she doesn’t mince her words on “Mangetout”, with its terse hookline “get lost forever”. In one of the album’s few breaks from bliss, a mock coquettish Teasdale drips bile as she trills sweetly “you’re washed up, irrelevant and standing in my light”. As melodic fuzz guitars build up a head of steam, she seems to damn all male-kind before dropping the mic, message delivered, job done.
Hester Chambers, meanwhile, offers her take on love at first sight on “Pond Song”. Cosmological couplings and Princess Bride references are propelled along by the fuzz guitar and bouncy keyboard combo once favoured by Elastica. It may possibly be the only love song ever to namecheck the Solent, but where else is an Isle of Wight girl going to gaze wistfully across the water? Chambers makes more slightly dorky cultural connections – “the rock to my roll… we go like salsa and Doritos” – on melodic grunge track “Don’t Speak”. With super-soft vocals, she touches on the vulnerability of obsession, where emotional availability tips over into malleability.
The album’s most graceful moment, “11:21”, is also one of the highlights, as Teasdale stretches her vocal from plaintive soprano to plangent alto, while Chambers makes the tin whistle flutter with surprising elegance. In contrast, the entire band whoop it up on the closing “U And Me At Home”, all chiming in with animalistic whoops on the titular hookline to produce an exultant group mantra.
By this point, it’s all too clear that Wet Leg have blitzed any second album nerves. Indeed, Moisturizer is a bold confident blast fuelled by the security and invincibility of a deep love, whether the songs pitch headlong into a torrid affair on the punchy “Pillow Talk” or into the rush of new love on the alluring twanging canter of “Pokemon”. “I don’t wanna take it slow,” insists Teasdale, as the chaise longue disappears in the rearview mirror.
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