Just because Rhian Teasdale is in love doesn’t mean she isn’t still going to spit in your face. That statement will come as a great relief to fans of Wet Leg, whose 2022 self-titled debut was a rollicking condemnation of horned-up exes, wannabe rock stars, rich kids, and the band members themselves, who, it must be said, at times seemed to embody all the aforementioned characters. Instead, on their 2025 follow-up moisturizer, the Isle of Wight five-piece turn falling in love into the sort of occasion that merits spitting in faces and having one’s own face spat on in return.
A sense of self-effacement—sometimes playful, sometimes purely masochistic—permeates moisturizer’s lovergirl aura, as when Teasdale cries, “Is it love, or suicide?” on the album’s cheeky, scritchy opener, “CPR.” An ambulance siren plays in the background as the track crescendos, the emergency of being enamored literalized into a 999 call. Hester Chambers and Joshua Mobaraki smash their electric guitars together as the ambulance rips through the streets. “I’m in love, and you’re to blame,” Teasdale scolds an interlocutor one imagines sitting sheepishly beside her as she lies on the gurney. This won’t, then, be a love album we’re used to hearing.
And just as well: Wet Leg take great pains to avoid traditionalism. The band carved out a cult following in 2022 with its raucous, rude, zeitgeisty debut, an album our Paste contributor Eric Danton called a “slacker-rock anthem from people who aren’t really slackers at all.” As usual, Eric is right: everything Wet Leg does is messily meticulous. On “davina mccall,” a single named after a British TV presenter, Teasdale’s rhythmic, breathy monotony breaks open into a teasing, lovestruck ballad. Saccharine soundbites like “Every day is spent trying to say something to make you smile” come right before the ridiculous refrain, “I’ll be your Shakira / Whenever, wherever.” At moments when the band’s tried-and-true instrumentation can seem rote, its lyrical ingenuity maintains moisturizer’s novel feel.
Take “mangetout,” a buzzing, bitchy anthem written for every woman who’s ever been dragged down by some guy who views her as a sexy alt-rock ornament, the band goes back to its roots. “You think I’m pretty / You think I’m pretty cool / You wanna fuck me? / I know most people do,” Teasdale hisses. An incessant guitar riff and Ellis Durand’s thrumming bass pulse behind the singer’s gleeful purr. “Get lost forever!” Teasdale crows gleefully as the refrain’s “cool” turns to “cruel.” If there’s one hill Wet Leg dies on, it’s the joys of being just a little mean. If you don’t trust me, turn to “catch these fists,” the album’s lead single: The song is a wall of angry, drunken, sadistic sound: “I just threw up in my mouth / When he tried to ask me out!” Teasdale playfully recounts, as Henry Holmes’s drums pummel the poor sucker who tried to talk to her into a hole invented from his own skeeviness.
“don’t speak” explores a new, almost shoegaze-y genre for the band. As the chorus picks up, Chambers’ dreamily layered vocals are nearly drowned out by a growing wave of distorted guitars. “I can say I love you / Just by looking in your eyes,” Chambers promises, a rare showing of the sultry guitarist’s high-pitch talents. “But I’ll say it if you like / I’ll say whatever you like.” It’s a gentler side of the band than we’ve yet seen, but not a relinquishing of their strangeness: a line in the second verse proudly proclaims, “Sweet baby girl we go like salsa and Doritos.”
The most surprising moment on moisturizer, however, comes during “11:21,” an eleventh-hour stab at the sort of traditional love song the band has spent the entire album carving itself in opposition to. It starts out sounding suspiciously like a lo-fi hip-hop beat to relax to, but a melancholic bassline and Teasdale’s mournful trill quickly posits “11:21” as a searing picture of desperation. “I love you like nobody else,” she insists, a double-entendre of a hook that mirrors the desperate failure to understand her lover. Teasdale’s Weyes Bloodian soprano II is rarely seen throughout the band’s corpus, and the song’s quiet gravitas proves the band’s confidence in its growing versatility.
In the three years since their eponymous debut, Wet Leg have toured the globe, played on Fallon, scored a Tiny Desk appearance, and won multiple Grammy awards. When the band announced moisturizer this spring, fans fretted, with good reason, that they might go mainstream. After all, a boring sophomore album isn’t anomalous in the industry. But, to all our great relief, Wet Leg are still just as weird as they’ve always promised to be. moisturizer is different from the band’s debut—more pensive, more entangled, perhaps more insecure—but it is still blessedly, joyously, and essentially strange. It is also sad and horny and moon-eyed and wired-up and creeped out and existentially anxious and preposterously sophomoric. It’s a lot of emotions, and in great, heaping quantities—which is to say: moisturizer is an album about being in your twenties, and thank God someone is having fun writing about it, because, as Wet Leg themselves share with us: Jesus, is it a shit show.
Miranda Wollen is a former Paste Music intern. She lives in New York and attends school in Connecticut, but you can find her online @mirandakwollen.
