By Esme Campbell
Photo Credit: Domino Records
“Good job, give you an A / A golden star,” sang a pink-haired Rhian Teasdale to a Brooklyn crowd last week, who shouted back “You think you’re clever!”
Scorn is made sexy again in mangetout, a punchy post-punk track from Wet Leg’s recently released sophomore album, where brazenness oozes from back-to-back taunts. And the New Yorkers at one of the band’s many sold-out shows clearly agree.
Following two GRAMMYs, a world tour, and a period of falsely proclaiming their album was done when interviewers asked about it (they hadn’t even started it yet), the long-anticipated Moisturizer has been a hit. The sweeping success of their first album clearly didn’t intimidate them.
Moisturizer is imbued with confidence and effortlessness, producing an outstanding record that goes above and beyond all the expectations set by their 2022 debut. It’s undeniably a well-executed vision, and a middle finger to the ‘second-album curse’ that many had feared for them.
Featuring love, libido, and the occasional lousy man, Moisturizer preserves the band’s signature elements and dabbles with multiple genres to create something attractive, intimate and immensely fun. While retaining the punchy quips, addictive riffs, and charming absurdity that make them Wet Leg, the album indicates the band breaking the boundaries of their own mould. Moisturizer displays growth in a metamorphosis of new sounds, theatrics, and lyrical exploration, all encased in a delightfully unsettling album cover.
Wet Leg have never reduced love to a fairytale, and as romance reigns in their newest release, they manage to convey all the giddy, lascivious, and tear-your-own-hair-out kind of feelings that come with it. Woven throughout is the message that falling in love is as gritty as it is pretty – an emotional overwhelm that can feel violent. Succinctly summarised by lines from their debut album, “I feel like someone has punched me in the guts / But I kinda like it ‘cause it feels like being in love”, it’s a perspective continued in Moisturizer, the first track, CPR, featuring Teasdale begging the question “Is it love or suicide?”
But compared to the sentiment in their first album, love has fewer teeth this time around. Inspired by Teasdale being enamoured in her first queer relationship, Moisturizer is undoubtedly gooier than its predecessor and carries all the vertiginous ecstasy of falling for someone. “How did I get so lucky to be loving you?” she murmurs against the strumming in liquidize.
The band’s signature candour complements an unapologetically vulnerable angle, producing a collection of tracks that flip-flop between the rockiness and excitement of falling head over heels. Love is a rollercoaster and Wet Leg straps you in.
Teasdale’s muse isn’t the only change that influenced Moisturizer, however; live band members Joshua Mobaraki, Ellis Durand and Henry Holmes were incorporated into the songwriting process this time around, which was previously reserved by Teasdale and fellow founder Hester Chambers.
The product is a mature, abundant sound that genre-hops between the alt-rock-influenced CPR and the dance-punk feel of catch these fists, to the pop hooks in tracks like davina mccall. It feels fuller, bolder and more assertive.
So, it’s no wonder that the Isle of Wight five-piece, which started as a conversation on a ferris wheel, are now selling out shows across the ocean.
Moisturizer is available to stream now.
Unless otherwise stated, Photography & Text Copyright 2025 © Esme Campbell/ADRENALINE Magazine.
Alexandra Pullen