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.
The Ed Sheeran people remember from the early days, the one who got into drunken fights and wrote heartfelt love songs to make up for showing up late from the pub, would probably have turned Play into a drinking game. Every time he uses an explosion metaphor, you take a shot. If he brings up the stars, you finish your Guinness. If you are bold enough, you can add references to heaven into the mix, though I would not recommend it. Some quick back-of-the-napkin math suggests that by the 20-minute mark of Play, you would already be 13 shots deep.
Whatever you think of Sheeran, he has never come across this uninspired before. In the first decade of his career, he managed to use his “average guy” persona to hide a relentless drive for success, a quality he shared with his friend and collaborator Taylor Swift. He started with “The A Team,” an acoustic debut single about homelessness and drug addiction, and spun it into a series of albums filled with dependable wedding staples. Along the way, he leaned into flashy but practical genre experiments that produced high-stakes hits like “Shape of You,” “I Don’t Care,” and “Bad Habits.”
Sheeran’s most clever trick was realizing that his very everyday personal life gave him the freedom to take musical risks that would have been harder for other stars. He married his high school sweetheart, keeps close with his childhood friends, and has even joked about once soiling himself onstage. That kind of everyman image allowed him to dabble in grime, dancehall, and even release a song with Cardi B where she claimed that “Ed got a little jungle fever.” He never seemed like a jet-setting, trend-chasing multimillionaire. Instead, he was the relatable guy who could skim through Latin trap, hip-hop, and folk pop and somehow turn it all into hits.
By his own words, Sheeran no longer has that same fire. He told The New York Times, “Pop is a young person’s game and you have to really, really be in it and want it. I’ve found myself stepping back more and more and being like, actually, I’m really valuing family.” While this might seem like a quiet retreat from the pop machine, it undercuts the work of artists like Swift and Madonna, who have fought to prove that pop is not just for the young. And more importantly, it rings hollow when you listen to Play, which feels like a retreat after 2023’s and Autumn Variations, his first studio albums since 2011, not to top the Billboard 200.
For someone as fixated on stats as Sheeran, this fact must sting. Early in the Play, he even says he wants to “keep this Usain pace.” Yet you can also hear the exhaustion throughout the record, where he goes back to his two safest formulas, romantic wedding songs and “global” pop bangers, without much of the spark or warmth that made him such a draw in the first place. The result is a clash between lingering ambition and a lack of effort, leaving Sheeran sounding like the one thing he never wanted to be seen as: a calculating pop star driven more by the need to hold onto his status than by genuine love of music.
That shift was not inevitable. The first track, “Opening,” is actually one of the most interesting moments on the album. It starts with a soft acoustic intro before veering into some of Sheeran’s weakest attempts at rap: “In this world, there’s no relaxin’/I’ve been here since migraine skankin’/Never been cool, but never been a has-been.” His awkward rhymes and the sing-song delivery make it tough to listen to, but lyrically, it is revealing. He admits he may have “lost his way,” worries that his “career’s in a risky place,” and references fallings-out, though he never says exactly what they were. It sets up the possibility of an album where Sheeran might really reflect on his place in the music industry and in his own life.
That is not what Play turns out to be. Instead, when he circles back to those ideas, it is through heavy-handed sentiment. On the stomping sing-along “Old Phone,” he discovers a decade-old device full of texts and photos, including messages from exes and friends who have since passed away. His conclusion that maybe it is best left in the past feels obvious and flat. When he sings about the “overwhelming sadness” of friends he has lost, it comes across more like a diary entry than honest introspection. He doesn’t push deeper into what those feelings mean. For someone who doesn’t currently own a phone, Sheeran misses the irony that most people’s phones today are already crammed with both love and hate. By the bridge, he has tucked the phone away again, as if to wrap the idea neatly without exploring it further.
“Old Phone” at least tries something slightly new, but elsewhere Sheeran falls back on old patterns. On “Camera,” he revisits the reassuring-but-bland style of his One Direction co-write “Little Things,” reminding his partner she is beautiful despite insecurities. Then he flips the concept of his 2015 hit “Photograph,” singing, “I don’t need a camera to capture this moment/I’ll remember how you look tonight for all my life.” The effect is less touching and more like a tired echo of Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight.”
The box-checking continues with songs like “In Other Words,” which feels like a weaker version of “Perfect,” and “The Vow,” which recalls “Thinking Out Loud.” Then there is “A Little More,” a bitter breakup track where Sheeran sings, “I can’t call you crazy/’Cause you could be diagnosed.” It reminds listeners of two things: he struggles to show empathy toward exes in his writing, and his attempts at humor rarely land.
The bright spots come when Sheeran leans into sounds outside his usual palette. “Azizam,” which takes its name from an Iranian term meaning “my darling,” is the most vibrant song here, full of energy and rhythm, with producer Ilya weaving in traditional Iranian instruments. “Sapphire,” a collaboration with Punjabi star Arijit Singh, and “Symmetry,” which builds on a lively tabla rhythm from Jayesh Kathak, are heavy-handed but carried by Sheeran’s genuine enthusiasm. The excitement in his delivery recalls the risk-taking that once made songs like “South of the Border” so oddly compelling. With Shah Rukh Khan, India’s biggest film icon, appearing in the “Sapphire” video, these songs are positioned to make a real impact.
On these tracks, Sheeran finally sounds engaged. He has said he finished the album in Goa, and these moments feel alive enough that you wish he had built the whole project around them. Still, the timing feels strange. Just one day before the album’s release, more than 110,000 far-right protesters marched through London, railing against immigration. Against that backdrop, Sheeran’s lighthearted collaborations with Indian and Iranian musicians feel disconnected, like escapist gestures at a time when such apolitical optimism already feels outdated.
The record closes with “Heaven,” one of its better songs, but also one that highlights Sheeran’s ongoing issues. On one level, it nods to a recurring critique of his work: even though he won both of his copyright lawsuits in 2023 and 2024, many listeners still hear echoes of other songs in his writing, and “Heaven” sounds a lot like Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours” or Charli XCX’s “Everything Is Romantic.” On another level, its mix of light percussion and straightforward lyrics strikes a balance between the adventurousness he claims he has outgrown and the clichés that drag down much of the album. But then, as if unable to help himself, he falls back on familiar imagery: “Chemicals bursting, exploding/As every second’s unfolding.” Which, if you are playing the drinking game, means another double shot.
