It’s a tale as old as indie rock itself: Wet Leg didn’t think anyone would hear “Chaise Longue.” Barely two years after college friends Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers decided to write music together on a whim, their deadpan, Mean Girls-quoting debut single made them international stars. In the short time that followed, they opened for Harry Styles, rock veterans like Dave Grohl and Iggy Pop became fans, and their self-titled LP won them multiple Grammys. Beyond their relatively simple, hook-based post-punk, there was also something endearing about Teasdale and Chambers, two conventionally attractive, deliberately softspoken, undoubtedly cool young women from the sleepy Isle Of Wight who dressed like they had eBay alerts set up for Gunne Sax skirts and wielded kitschy props like lobster claws in their music videos. To the uninitiated, it was sometimes hard to discern if Wet Leg were taking themselves overly seriously or not seriously enough. Time spent with the music suggested the circumstances were more aligned with the latter.
Even with the runaway success of the unserious, playful Wet Leg, Wet Leg didn’t think they’d have the opportunity — or even the time amid their insane touring schedule — to record their sophomore album moisturizer, out this Friday. They recorded it at an Airbnb in the Suffolk beach town Southwold, and after having spent so much time on the road with touring members Josh Mobaraki, Ellis Durand, and Henry Holmes, it only felt right to Teasdale and Chambers to bring them into the writing process as well. moisturizer is Wet Leg’s reintroduction as a full band rather than a duo, and was, by their own admission, an album written with live shows in mind. I’d wager that’s a reason why Wet Leg promoted the album with a series of one-off intimate gigs earlier this year.
I saw Wet Leg debut a handful of moisturizer songs at one of those shows, a particularly crowded, rainy evening at Bushwick’s Market Hotel. From the jump, I sensed a change, particularly in Teasdale’s physical presentation: She’d swapped out her typical twee hair ribbons for all-over bleach, her girlish dresses for a skimpy loungewear set. When Wet Leg kicked off moisturizer’s menacing lead single “catch these fists,” Teasdale posed with her arms up at 90-degree angles, hard-earned biceps protruding: “Man down/ Level up,” she proclaims on the dance-punky chorus, willing her wish into reality.
Using various phrases to tell men to fuck off isn’t exactly a new schtick for Wet Leg. Teasdale was healing from a breakup when writing Wet Leg, her sympathetic frustration evident in pitying lines like “When I think about what you’ve become, I feel sorry for your mum.” Where Wet Leg impugned shitty dudes with an evergreen “can’t live with them, can’t live without them” attitude, moisturizer comes from a more self-assured and less dependent place: “You’re washed up, irrelevant, and standing in my light,” Teasdale coos matter-of-factly in a featherlight soprano on the ultra-catchy “mangetout,” not the slightest bit doubtful.
Maybe that renewed sense of self comes from the fact that in the three years since Wet Leg’s debut, Teasdale — who’d previously assumed she was straight — found herself in her first queer romantic relationship. moisturizer mostly comprises love songs, with Teasdale singing to her partner with a sort of wide-eyed wonder. But there aren’t a ton of explicit references to gender or sexual orientation here, save for the horned-up rocker “pillow talk,” where Teasdale suggests attraction to the notoriously androgynous frontierswoman Calamity Jane.
More often, she just alludes to the vague newness of it all without question: “So many creatures and now it’s just you,” she ponders on the breezy, very pretty “liquidize,” perhaps a tongue-in-cheek dehumanization of the men who preyed on her before. “How did I get so lucky to be loving you?” Over the electroclash noise of the piercing album opener “CPR,” Teasdale is so smitten that she debates calling the emergency phone number. At the same time, things like bungee jumping off a cliff and running away from paranormal spirits aren’t so scary when equipped with love — as she eventually divulges to the 999 operator — that’s so apparently steadfast. A connection this powerful should feel scary, Teasdale seems to suggest. So why does it feel so natural instead?
Teasdale doesn’t offer too much introspection into this ostensibly world-altering, self-reinventing relationship beyond the fact that it just feels right. moisturizer falls short in the same ways the great, but certainly not groundbreaking Wet Leg did in its occasionally callow lyrics: “You wanna go for a drive?/ I don’t wanna take it slow,” Teasdale asks on the cliché-laden “pokemon,” a passable synth-pop jaunt that feels misplaced among the album’s otherwise guitar-centric approach. Aside from that one Wild West reference, “pillow talk” leans on innuendos like “I can make you wet like an aquarium” which are too absurd to be sexy and too awkward to be funny.
Redemption comes in the more earnest love songs like “davina mccall,” where Teasdale’s devotion is just as entertaining to watch as reality television: “I’ll be your Shakira/ Whenever, wherever,” over a saccharine, mellow jangle. “It’s not like the birds fall from the sky when I’m not with you/ But it feels like they just might,” she sings on the delicate, brooding ballad “11:21,” her voice soaring enough to make up for the impaired fowl. From a lyric-focused listener’s standpoint, moisturizer can tend to feel like it spends too much time looking outward, a fairytale-like depiction of love that doesn’t seem to consider very many consequences. But Wet Leg have established that they’re experts at not taking themselves too seriously; much like how “Chaise Longue” took off with guns blazing, their narrators can appear seemingly out of nowhere. They’re not trying to assimilate to the world around them: They’re assessing it and finding their own place within it.
moisturizer is out 7/11 via Domino.
