moisturizer

Rhian Teasdale is a frontwoman who leans into the uncanny and the strange, never letting you guess her next move. Her vocals get at the spiky discomfort of being vulnerable—like the friend who puts on a silly voice while they’re sharing bad news. On moisturizer, love is a force: It strikes, hits, leaves you gasping for air. For Teasdale, these are “not demure love songs,” but “desperate” ones. She oscillates violently, gleefully between the terror and the wonder of falling for someone. “Call the triple nine and give me CPR,” she sings in a biting falsetto all damsel-in-distress. Moments later, she’s shapeshifted into a deeper, deadpan alter ego, voice booming from the bottom of her chest as she asks: “Is it love or suicide?”

This is a bold new look for Wet Leg, the duo of Teasdale and guitarist and co-writer Hester Chambers, who met while studying music as teenagers on the Isle of Wight, a pastoral island off the south coast of England. They were the band everyone had an opinion on in 2022 after the viral breakthrough of their debut single “Chaise Longue.” Depending on who you spoke to, they were grifters whose success was shaped by industry executives, or the prophesied second coming of 2000s indie sleaze.

Part of their appeal was their unseriousness—frolicking in lobster claws and straw hats, they refused to assign any deeper meaning to their Lewis Carroll-meets-Arctic Monkeys gibberish. That irreverence was intoxicating, in the field of mainstream guitar music in which women are typically sexy, tortured, or both, and rarely afforded the freedom to be simply silly. But beneath all the gags, take-downs, and audacious hooks, there was an enigmatic question mark around who Wet Leg really were.

In the build-up to moisturizer, the band underwent two major changes, creatively and personally. First, they began working more collaboratively as a five-piece, recruiting live musicians guitarist Joshua Mobaraki, bassist Ellis Durand, and drummer Henry Holmes to join the songwriting process. The result is a meatier, more expansive sound, beefed up once again by producer Dan Carey, who’s also worked with Fontaines D.C. and Black Midi.

Second, Teasdale fell in love with her partner, who is non-binary, and discovered her queer identity in the process. Suddenly, writing love songs didn’t feel boring. This seismic shift in Teasdale’s outlook suffuses moisturizer with all the anxious joy of second adolescence. The emotional register of the record is that of someone who’s just been prescribed glasses, and is stunned at seeing clearly for the first time.

That’s the overtone of “liquidize,” where Teasdale asks with sincere yet fearful glee how she got so lucky. She configures romance as a playground game of chicken—“I know you are but what am I”—both a come-on and a dare. On “pond song,” written by Chambers, meeting a partner is like finding God, or like receiving a roundhouse kick to the face, or somehow both. Its eerie layered vocals and crackles of distortion build to the explosion of a singalong chorus: “I’ve never been so deep! In! Love!” The record’s best songs all contain this tension—they drift between embracing romantic cliché and, as Teasdale does in the video for “catch these fists,” vomiting at it.

“Catch these fists,” the record’s raucous lead single, is also its least interesting. While the criss-crossing jabs of its riffs will make it a highlight of festival sets this summer—plus the satisfaction in its casual middle finger to sexual harassment—it also retreads overly familiar ground for Wet Leg. Their ketamine punchline—“giddy up”—is only funny on the first listen, particularly when the phrase “giddy up” appears in a different guise later on the record. This isn’t the only instance of lyrical images and phrases looping through the album, suggesting that Wet Leg could still do more to shake themselves free of their own formulas. Where they shine is in the record’s more unexpectedly tender moments, such as “davina mccall”: a song named after the omnipresent British TV presenter best known for being fiercely protective of Big Brother contestants when she hosted the show in the 2000s. Here, and on the ghostly ballad “11:21,” Teasdale’s malleable voice stretches with ambition. She channels echoes of ’90s era Fiona Apple or Björk, gliding between spoken-word defiance and robust, melodic fragility.

The smile in her voice is audible on “pokémon,” a breezy, shoegaze-y driving anthem with an anxious rhythm. Despite feeling like uncharted territory for Wet Leg—the song’s whisper-thin, bubbling layers of synth buttress a sunny and heartfelt chorus—it weaves their trademark surreality into the sincerity. There are references to the titular Pokémon and the creepy Demon Headmaster, anchoring the timeless hook in the specific context of British millennials’ childhood TV—which feels like a wink-wink-nudge-nudge way to make the point that a good relationship can feel like coming home to your child self. There’s no separating Wet Leg from the brazen humor that gave them their breakthrough. But this record is as dazzlingly earnest as it is wry, displaying the staying power of a band that will outlast a sense of novelty. That feels like their best punchline yet.