It’s a rain-soaked night in Brooklyn, and Market Hotel—arguably Bushwick’s tiniest, sweatiest club—is bursting at the seams as 500 (or more) of the city’s fortuitous indie rock fans are shoulder to shoulder, happy they made it into the last-minute surprise show. The air is thick and steamy, jittery with electricity, and there’s no time to debate if the perspiration on your arms is yours or someone else’s: Wet Leg, the highly acclaimed, could-play-a-venue-countless-times-this-size five-piece from Isle of Wight are about to take the small stage in the misshapen room—blessing us with an underplay, and a first taste of their second album moisturizer live.
Parting the sea of fans, the band, led by Rhian Teasdale and followed close behind by Hester Chambers, walk toward the platform and through the crowd, guitars in tow. Teasdale is wearing a 666 tank top and boxer briefs that say Holy Spirit. Her hair is a rose gold blush hue. She sizes up the room as she stands in a muscle pose. Her fierce onstage presence is vastly different from the meek-looking brunette who, along with band cofounder Hester, brought us the cheeky, electric-guitar driven, intoxicating debut single “Chaise Lounge” back in 2021. The two of them used to stand in parallel onstage, but —Chambers seems to have taken a few steps backward, letting Teasdale take the reins, and she’s radiating formidable front woman energy. But no time to dissect the new setup and staggering look—the gritty guitars and crashing percussion of “catch these fists” have begun, and they’re loud enough to drown out the train that passes behind the stage during the set. “Can you catch a medicine ball?” Teasdale asks with deadpan delivery, making eyes with the congregation beneath her. By the time the words “Cause what I really wanna know is can you catch these fists?” leave her lips and hit our ears, we’re won over, and when the swelling refrain rushes in on the back of ricocheting bass parts, right before a blistering chorus pulls us in, BUST is giddy, swinging our hair to dance-punk so pure, so frenetic, it’s clear the chart-topping band are on to another winner.
A few days later, at a Williamsburg hotel café, Teasdale revisits that night.“It’s always nice when you get to share [music] you’ve been sitting on for a little bit,” she tells BUST of “catch these fists,” the jewels decorating her teeth shimmering as she speaks. She’s wearing the same “Holiday” sleeveless top she sported the evening before on The Tonight Show, and despite being dressed like she could knock you out in a ring, she’s intensely disarming.
The band began writing their second album in March of last year, isolating themselves in the small seaside town of Southwold, England. They’d just gotten off tour and thanks to the success of their debut (they scooped up Best Alternative Music Performance for “Chaise Lounge” and Best Alternative Music Album for their self-titled debut at the 2023 Grammy Awards), there was lots of chatter about when and what they’d create next. “I don’t think we internalized it or took it on all that much when people were asking us about [the next album],” Teasdale says. “We were still super busy. We toured for two years. I was home for maybe six weeks.” Her smile widens when BUST asks what allowed the band to handle their blitzy, two-year schedule: “Maybe a bit of resilience…and naivety.”
Once the tour stopped, they disappeared from social media and attempted to relax into a static state. It didn’t last long. “We were like, ‘Oh my God, it’s gonna be so good to get back from tour and do nothing and chill,’” Teasdale recalls. “We did that, and then in the chat we were like, ‘Hey guys, I feel so crazy not doing anything.’ After two weeks, they started getting “itchy feet.” We were like, ‘Maybe we should think about writing something at some point.’” Once they started recording, the sound they honed on tour became the baseline for their new tracks, pushing them into louder, brasher, and bolder territory. Outside of their time on the road, there was another experience that shaped the album’s trajectory: Teasdale fell in love…“deep in love” after having what she coined a “queerpiphany” (but more on that later). Despite shying away from love as lyrical inspiration in the past, when it came to putting pen to paper, she just couldn’t help herself.
“I don’t know if I was consciously like, I wanna write love songs,” she says. “I was quite worried at first when we started writing ’cause I was like, We’ve been around the world and all I’ve seen is dressing room after dressing room,” she adds, admitting that though they had fun, she came out of those dates feeling like a “shell of a human.” “I was like, ‘What am I? What am I supposed to write about?’” But then, inspiration struck…right in the heart. “Simultaneously, whilst it’s all been happening, right at the beginning, I met my partner. I was painfully, heartachingly so in love with them.” Her aversion to love songs slipped away as she realized what she was excited to write about wouldn’t be “cliché” but “a diary entry” and a “snapshot of time.” “But I didn’t think about having to share all of this in the promo afterward,” she adds. She spoke to her partner about whether they should try and keep the true meanings of the songs under wraps. “We discussed ways I could spin it so that it’s less personal to me,” she says. “But I would just find it really hard. So I think I just have to come clean with everyone and be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m really in love.’”
Sure, “catch these fists” is about wanting to pummel a man who Teasdale ran into at a bar after leaving the safety of a Chappell Roan gig, finding herself thrust into toxic territory when, as the song narrates “Some guy comes up, says I’m his type/I just threw up in my mouth/When he just tried to ask me out.” And on “mangetout,” the band repels another nagging character, this time over steady percussion as Teasdale sings, “You think I’m pretty? You think I’m pretty cool? You wanna fuck me? I know most people do” punctuated by hits of the band singing “You bottomfeeder” and “Get lost forever.” But if you think those tracks are unrepentant, get ready for the most honest, brazen, at times emotionally chaotic love songs your heart could desire.
Post-punk ditty “jennifer’s body” was inspired by the cult classic film and the understated (depending on who you ask) queer dynamic between its two main characters. In it, the band echoes sweetly over spiraling guitar parts and steady drumming, “I like you, can’t you see I’m obsessed with you?” and “Every day starts and ends with you.” “Collectively as a band, we love horror,” Teasdale says of the song’s origins. “We watch a lot of horror films. And Jennifer’s Body is just the most iconic lesbian horror film. I had the privilege of watching it as a straight person and then a few years later, watching it as someone who’s had a queerpiphany,” she winks in a Valley Girl accent. “I saw it in a whole different light. The first time I saw it, I was like, Yeah, that’s cute. And then [when I watched it later] it was even more impactful.”
If there was any apprehension about writing about romance, that’s all tossed aside, as the emotion is on full display in “pond song.” Over shimmering electric guitar and kinetic drums, the band admits, “You’re so sweet even when you’re sour” before they sing in a round at the song’s symphonic peak, cathartically confessing, “I’ve never been so deep in love, deep in love.” On the slow-strumming “liquidize,” Teasdale asks herself “How did I get so lucky to be loving you?” over electric tones—sharing an acute retelling of yearning, envy, gratitude, and intoxication as she sings, “Love struck me down, the fuck am I doing here?” over pulsating guitars, before digging further into the onslaught of affection, pleading, “I want you to want me all the time.” With the buoyant, “davina mccall,” Wet Leg translates devotion into sonic form, as Teasdale sings, “Ask me if I love you baby you already know, it’s the kind of love.” Album closer “u and me at home” rushes in with a ’70s funk beat, with the whole band singing backing vocals as they reminisce on the sweetness of simply being home together.
Maybe one of the reasons Teasdale feels so comfortable writing about her personal life is a shift in how the band has established parameters between themselves and the general public. It’s a literal repositioning that BUST picked up on when Teasdale took a more prominent position onstage. “You learn to set boundaries,” Teasdale says, reflecting on where the band was while promoting their first album and now. “You learn to ask for things because generally if you ask for something, you get it. But you need to learn what your boundary is, and then you can ask for it. Everyone’s boundaries are different as well. And there are five of us in it.” Chambers, who in the last album cycle would take turns answering questions with Teasdale, doesn’t seem to be planning on taking part in interviews for moisturizer…and for good reason. She told The Guardian over email: “These past years have been a crash course in learning about myself, and one of those [lessons] is that my social anxiety won’t be therapied away.” The band seems to be embracing, happily, what works for each of them. And even on the album art, which shows Teasdale hunched over in a demon-like pose, her long sharp nails on the floor as her piercing eyes look directly into the lens, Chambers’s back is toward the camera—her claws visible behind her.
The band has had to figure out how to protect their creativity, their personal lives, and their careers as they go, because their rise to notoriety came at such a rapid pace. When I ask Teasdale if she realized in real time just how successful the band would be, she responds adamantly: “Not at all. It was so unexpected. Especially because the music industry is so obsessed with youth. When we signed to Domino [Records] I think I had just turned 28. I was like, ‘It’s over for me.’ Especially as a woman. It’s crazy how an intelligent person like myself can also internalize that and believe that and just give up. I’d fully given up before we got signed.” In fact, she’d decided to be a partner in her family’s business and Chambers was fully focused on a career making jewelry. “She is such a rock star,” Teasdale tells us. “I can’t imagine her doing anything else now… although she really is a great jeweler. She’s multitalented.”
The album art, music videos, and complementary photo shoots by Iris Luz are beautiful, eerie, alluring, and a bit “disgusting.” Much like Wet Leg’s moisturizer, the visuals force you to question your thoughts on the embodiment of sexiness and romantic relationships, from their sometimes shiny outer layer to their other times disturbing underbelly—all with enough pristine post-punk orchestration and lyrical magic to make the whole listen blissful from start to finish. It’s enough to make you fall in love. “I wanted it to be a bit subversive,” Teasdale says. “I wanted things to be disgusting and sexy at the same time. Even going back to the very first Wet Leg music video, it had that juxtaposition, particularly in the world of femininity and what that means. That’s something we’ve always enjoyed playing with.”
All Images Courtesy Of @Alicebackham
