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.
Bruce Springsteen was right. At the risk of simplifying the value of this impressive box set, giving away the main storyline of his new biopic, and flattening decades of mythmaking, the reality is just what Springsteen always claimed. Even when he tried the material with his closest collaborators, using some of the strongest songs he had ever written, the most powerful version of Nebraska is still the one he recorded at home in Colts Neck in January 1982. Just a lonely man in his early thirties with an acoustic guitar, a TASCAM PortaStudio, and an Echoplex, capturing solo demos for what he thought would be a full-band project. Everything that came after was an experiment.
But what an experiment it turned out to be. For those who don’t know the story, here it is in brief. After the success of his upbeat 1980 single “Hungry Heart” and a long streak of relentless touring and critical praise, Springsteen entered one of the most creatively intense chapters of his life. He began by writing the grim ballads and shadowy lullabies of Nebraska, which he then tried to recreate with the E Street Band and in solo studio sessions before ultimately choosing to release the home demos. He did no press and no tour, which left him free to keep writing, and that work became 1984’s massive commercial hit Born in the U.S.A. During that time, he tossed aside enough songs to fill multiple albums, later shared through collections like Tracks and Tracks II: The Lost Albums. He also found time to help revive the career of early rock’n’roll icon Gary U.S. Bonds, co-writing and co-producing two comeback records, contributing a Grammy-winning song to Donna Summer, and hitting the gym with enthusiasm.
It might sound like a golden moment, but for Bruce, it felt like a creative cage—the kind of brooding, restless chapter that inspires a filmmaker to cast Jeremy Allen White to play you on screen. The twist is that the most crucial moments, from the original Nebraska to the electric and explosive version of “Born in the U.S.A.,” happened quickly and naturally, before anyone could complicate the process. Unlike anything else in his official catalog, Nebraska 82: Expanded Edition offers a clear window into that moment. Within this tight collection is a sharper, more complete image of one of Springsteen’s most legendary and personal records—still the one he treasures most—along with rare insight into his creative rhythm.
The set includes a newly remastered version of the album, a disc of solo acoustic outtakes carrying the same raw emotion, the legendary Electric Nebraska sessions, and a live album and film capturing Springsteen performing the record start to finish in an empty New Jersey theater earlier this year. The live material feels reverent, with beautiful support from former Bob Dylan bandmate Larry Campbell. The remaster reveals that, despite the album’s association with the birth of lo-fi, the sound is richer and more intentional than much of what followed. Listen to the last half minute of “Atlantic City” through headphones and focus on how the acoustic guitars, mandolin, and background vocals fade away layer by layer. It’s a reminder of how much careful craft went into creating such stark beauty.
Unlike his earlier box sets for Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River, this one isn’t about showcasing how many different paths he could have taken. It’s about sharpening the vision. Where Nebraska is known for its unbroken mood, Electric Nebraska jerks between heartland laments and roaring rock songs across its eight tracks. These takes feel like rough sketches more than finished recordings—mostly Springsteen on electric guitar and vocals, Max Weinberg on drums, and Garry Tallant on bass—hinting at an album that could have been more accessible and mainstream in 1982. And yet, this raw version of “Downbound Train,” with its clanging rhythms and unsettling bridge, may be one of the strangest things he ever put to tape.
It’s easy to see why Springsteen thought these sessions didn’t work. Versions of “Open All Night” and “Johnny 99,” which on the original album burn with desperate energy, sound here like something a bar band could fall into with a casual count-in and some good-natured rockabilly riffs. On one hand, it highlights how his delivery gives shape and gravity to his songwriting. (Compare the early acoustic “Thunder Road” to its triumphant album version for proof.) On the other hand, slipping into different musical skins was a key part of his process then. He could turn something as playful as “Pink Cadillac” into a moaning, shadowy reflection of itself, as if the character had returned to earth wrecked and hollow, fixated on one thought.
For devoted fans, these shifts are what make the box set essential: witnessing how songs like “Working on a Highway” transformed from a chilling ballad called “Child Bride” into a loud, laughing, raucous number. Some of the outtakes, like the quietly devastating country song “Losin’ Kind,” have been passed around unofficially for years. But this set also reveals two entirely unheard songs: “On the Prowl” and “Gun in Every Home.” In the first, he ends with a dizzying repetition of “searching,” drenched in slapback echo that mimics the sound of a live band. In the second, he paints a nightmarish portrait of suburban life and ends with a bare, defeated admission: “I don’t know what to do.”
Within a single song, Springsteen might take the role of a killer hiding in the dark or a runaway on the move, either escaping or facing the question of whether being caught is actually a strange kind of salvation. That’s the point of sitting in the dark: you can’t see the exit. Yet sometimes he caught brief glimpses of where it all might lead. Along with the original demo tape, Springsteen sent a letter to his manager, Jon Landau. He went through each track, detailing the grim subject matter, floating arrangement ideas, and occasionally letting a sliver of optimism shine through.
He scribbled a note next to “Born in the U.S.A.,” which appears here in two early forms: a heavy acoustic blues and a full-band rocker stripped of its later synths, leaving no doubt about how the narrator feels. “Might have potential,” he wrote. That small spark of belief carried him through. He knew these songs would take work, and that truly understanding them would take time. But he also trusted that at the end of each hard-earned day, there would still be magic in the night.
