Bleep

Press Release

Wet Leg - the Isle of Wight five-piece founded by Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers – have announced their eagerly anticipated second album moisturizer will be released on July 11th.

moisturizer. Active ingredients: kinship, Davina McCall, tourburn, ketamine, true love, every Alien film, Dan Carey, devotion, the Solent, CPR dolls, rapid success, Jennifer and Needy, obsession, guitars, lesbian sex, Suffolk, and cabin fever. The ripping second album by Wet Leg is fun and freaky and fabulous, an unbridled display of the live muscle they built up over a few years of non-stop touring. Punchier, prettier and more perverted where it counts, moisturizer is an album of manic love songs and well-timed kiss-offs, delivered by a clan of the UK’s most beloved oddballs. Apply liberally.

In a sense, work on moisturizer began before Wet Leg’s self-titled 2022 debut album even came out. Touring with Ellis Durand (bass), Henry Holmes (drums), and Joshua Mobaraki (guitar, synth), Wet Leg developed into a taut, caustic live operation that made good on that album’s success: #1 chart placements at home and abroad, three Grammys, two Brits and over half a billion streams. If success presents a fork in the road for any new band – to “go pop” or keep following your muse – Wet Leg emphatically chose the latter path – including working with Dan Carey again as their producer. In March 2024, the band decamped to Southwold to write; living together, working all day, watching horror movies all night, they soon locked into a new sense of symbiosis. Subsequently, all five members of Wet Leg have writing credits on moisturizer - “We were just kind of having fun and exploring,” says Chambers. “We focussed on: Is this going to be fun to play live? It was very natural that we would write the second record together” adds Teasdale.

Alongside the album announcement, the band also share the first taste of moisturizer with its frenetic, alluringly combative lead single “catch these fists.” Kicking things off with an untameable, electrified groove and from its opening seconds, “catch these fists” is dance-punk par excellence – bass notes ricocheting off a wall of howling synth, thunderous beat catching strays from Teasdale’s cruel deadpan.

As happens a couple of times on moisturizer, the major animus behind “catch these fists” was an interaction with a belligerent man, as chronicled in the song’s final verse. This is not to say shtcnt men are the sole focus of moisturizer — no matter how much “mangetout”, with its withering chorus of “get lost forever” may feel like the Nicole Kidman divorce photo in song form. On the contrary, this largely is an album about being, as the band exclaim on “pond song”, so “DEEP! IN! LOVE!!!!” moisturizer contains love songs of every stripe: stressed-out, gooey-eyed, gratuitously horny, blissed out, obsessive and mysterious.

In November 2021, Teasdale fell in love, a life change that ended up permeating the entirety of moisturizer. Although she previously felt allergic to writing love songs, this album is defined by its sheer exuberance: “How did I get so lucky?/It’s not like me to fall so head over heels,” she wonders on “liquidize”. “I thought I was straight all of my life until I met my current partner – these love songs are about them,” Teasdale recalls. “I just found it so much more interesting and empowering to be writing love songs where I’m not lusting over a man – it feels a little bit different.”

That new sense of empowerment extends to moisturizer’s album art, an instant-classic freak-fest in which Chambers and Teasdale bare long, ghoulish claws; Teasdale, sporting long, kitschy socks and sans eyebrows, grins fiendishly into the camera. It reflects the album, moisturizer is the band turning the dial up and delivering a record that is unapologetically bolder, stronger and raunchier.