Rian Teasdale knows exactly how absurd it all sounds. “Even though we’ve been touring for almost three years, when you release a new album you go right back to square one,” she says. “Like—will people like this? Will it offend their ears? Is it a vibe or not?”
This is Wet Leg, the band that arrived in 2021 like a sarcastic lightning bolt with Chaise Longue, Wet Dream, and an eponymous debut that became the rare indie record to bulldoze its way into mainstream award ceremonies. Suddenly Teasdale and her partner-in-crime Hester Chambers weren’t just cult heroes from the Isle of Wight; they were playing gravel pits in Los Angeles where crowds screamed every line back at them. “It’s surreal,” Teasdale says. “You chisel songs out of nothing, and a few months later, people are shouting them at you in a parking lot. Weird job.”
The new record, Moisturizer, comes with all the baggage of the “sophomore slump” myth, except Wet Leg don’t seem particularly interested in participating. Their strategy for dealing with the pressure was essentially unplug-and-hide. “We rented a house in the countryside. No distractions. Deleted social media,” Teasdale says. “Life just goes on as normal, except now you’re forcing your friends to jam with you in the kitchen.”
The countryside house became a kind of commune-slash-bizarre film club. “We watched Braveheart six times but never finished it once,” Teasdale reveals. “We made it through all the Aliens, then quit during Alien vs. Predator because, yeah, it gets quite bad. And then Jennifer’s Body—which, obviously, made it onto the album.” If that sounds like a joke, it isn’t. The track “Jennifer’s Body” is credited to all five members of the band. “We ingested it,” Teasdale laughs. “That was part of the diet.”
The other shift: Wet Leg is no longer a duo. The bedroom-born GarageBand demos of the debut are gone, replaced by five humans in a room, knocking songs into shape. “It felt like the most natural thing in the world,” Teasdale says. “We’d read all these stories in music magazines about bands going away, shutting the world out, and just jamming. It’s romanticized, but it kind of works. If you’re writing songs you want to play live, you need to feel that energy in the room.”
Energy, in Wet Leg’s case, usually means a mash of irony, absurdity, and an occasional jab to the ribs. Case in point: “Catch These Fists,” which pivots from the album’s opening love songs into a chorus that screams, I don’t want your love, I just want to fight. “That one is definitely not directed at the person I’m in love with,” Teasdale clarifies.
Which brings us to the big twist: Moisturizer is Wet Leg’s love record. Sort of. “I’d never had the inclination to write a love song before,” Teasdale admits. “The world is saturated with love songs—why would we need another? But then I found myself in love, in this queer relationship with my partner who’s gender non-conforming, and suddenly I just… needed to. It was self-indulgent, but music is a self-indulgent beast anyway.”
Her favorite lyrical contradiction might be the one that distills the whole thing: love, but also suicide. The melodrama is tongue-in-cheek but rooted in something real. “I was dragging my heels,” she says. “Falling in love was terrifying. I kept going, ‘No, scary.’”
It helps that Teasdale has learned how to armor up. “Touring the first record, I realized this is the best job in the world—but it’s also frightening,” she says. “Some days you wake up anxious as hell, PMSing, not wanting to go on stage. But you click into it, like when you’re working in a café and you’re in the worst mood ever, but you put on this ‘Hello, how are you doing? What can I get for you?’ character. Being on stage isn’t so different. Flip the switch.”
That switch sometimes comes with choreography. Fans have watched Teasdale march her arms like a deranged drill sergeant, half-possessed, half-mocking arena-rock cliché. “At the end of the day, artists—we’re entertainers,” she says. “You might as well do something fun.”
Fun is still the point, even if the band’s creative decisions come with a manifesto-lite. Teasdale is skeptical of big budgets. “The more money you chuck at something, the worse it is creatively,” she says. That’s not anti-success; it’s anti-bloat. “Especially with videos—suddenly you’ve got all these people projecting what they think you are. And really, only you know. Why give that away?”
It’s a neat paradox: Wet Leg invite chaos into the writing room, but keep a death grip on their own aesthetic. They binge Alien sequels until their brains rot, then pull out the notebook and spin a new track from the wreckage. They worry if songs will “offend ears,” then debut them in a gravel pit. They hate love songs, until they don’t.
Teasdale shrugs it all off, like none of it matters. But Moisturizer is proof that it does. The record takes everything ridiculous about Wet Leg—the wit, the sarcasm, the refusal to play it cool—and wraps it around something strangely earnest. A band that once sang about sitting on a chaise longue now sings about being deeply, terrifyingly in love.
And still, they’ll fight you.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the video below.
