Taking the stage in a muscled power pose is a declaration of frontwoman confidence. And Rhian Teasdale is gleaming with it.
When her band Wet Leg played at Market Hotel in Brooklyn this spring, she strode up in a dingy undershirt and some glorified tighty-whities, and flexed her biceps at the crowd — a stance somewhere between bodybuilder and Wonder Woman.
Launching into the come-at-me lyrics of “Catch These Fists,” the pulsing lead single from the band’s upcoming album — “I don’t want your love, I just wanna fight” the chorus snarls — Teasdale, the rhythm guitarist, dropped her custom-made, bubble gum pink instrument, and flashed her guns again. Beside her, Hester Chambers, the college friend she started the band with, was playing lead guitar with her back to the audience (her version of a power move). When they got into “Chaise Longue,” the underground hit that put them on the map, they were both dancing and grinning.
Since Wet Leg emerged three years ago, its trajectory into indie-rock stardom has been a series of almost absurd feats. Pals from the Isle of Wight, England — a far reach from a musical hot spot — the group saw its self-titled debut LP explode, a chart-topper in the United Kingdom that also earned two Grammys. “Chaise Longue,” perhaps history’s catchiest track about a grandfather’s upholstered chair, had vocal fans in Elton John, Lorde and Dave Grohl; seemingly overnight, Wet Leg ascended from dingy clubs to stadiums, opening for Foo Fighters and Harry Styles.
This is a heady place to activate a sophomore album, “Moisturizer,” out July 11. Especially because, unlike the debut, which was mostly written by Teasdale and Chambers, the latest effort is the work of a five-piece — including Henry Holmes, the drummer; Ellis Durand, the bassist; and the multi-instrumentalist Joshua Mobaraki, who is also Chambers’s boyfriend.
And though Chambers, the lead guitarist, is still a full-fledged member of the group, she has stepped back from the sort of promotion she did for the first album, when the two women were featured as soft-spoken musical partners in matching cottagecore dresses. They were billed as a duo, and now, “we’re definitely a band,” Teasdale said decisively.
After two years of gigs as an ensemble, she added, “it just felt very natural that we would write the second album together — and let everyone have so much ownership of it.” A U.S. tour begins in September.
“Moisturizer” builds on the earwormy sonics of Wet Leg’s first record: Teasdale’s deadpan speak-singing; ’90s fuzz-guitar riffs and ’00s pop synths; and if-you-know-you-know cultural references, like the gently romantic “Davina McCall,” named for a British TV presenter. (The album’s “everyday word” title was a bit of an in-joke, Teasdale said, sort of like the band moniker — a reminder not to take themselves too seriously.)
What’s new is a spate of love songs, reflective of Teasdale’s deep, life-changing relationship with a nonbinary musician, and Chambers’s playful exploration of longstanding partnership. Even in the gushy numbers, though, emotional vulnerability has an edge: “Is it love, or suicide?” asks the opening track, “CPR.”
The cover art has Teasdale in a crouch, like she’s about to pounce; she and Chambers sport long, talon-like nails. In the group shot, they’re snuggling up, smiling, to a green-faced ghoul. “I really just feel like we all have each other’s backs, and we’re all in it together,” Teasdale said. “So it’s cozy, even when it’s scary.”
Navigating sudden fame and shifting band dynamics can be an onslaught — just ask Julian Casablancas, the Strokes frontman. But “they seem to be handling it awesome,” he said of Wet Leg. “I’m a big fan.” (He hoped his latest band, the Voidz, could open for them, he added, “if someone knows their agent — thanks.”)
For Chambers, 31, who declined to be interviewed or photographed, awareness of her own capacity to deal with nerves has only grown since the first album. “My social anxiety won’t be therapied away,” she once explained. Getting onstage could be a struggle, but she leans on advice from Teasdale: “Feel the fear, and do it anyway.”
Her crew was supportive. “We all want all of us to present, and be, exactly who we are,” Mobaraki, 31, said. If you sacrifice authenticity, “you’re not really making art at that point. You’re just sort of trying to serve something up.” He hesitated to describe his girlfriend merely as an introvert. “You would definitely sometimes catch her dancing very freely in the middle of the room,” he said. “And other times she would just be very happy to be sat quietly.” Neither precluded her from making music.
What has served as an anchor for the group as it grows is fiercely guarding its creative vision: directing its own videos for both albums, as Teasdale and Chambers did with “self-taught skills,” Teasdale said; writing together, holed up in a remote seaside location — this time a rental on England’s east coast. They spent a few weeks there in 2024, after they came off the road, “watching films and playing video games and making each other laugh,” Mobaraki said.
It felt almost like an indulgence, for a band whose day jobs — working in coffee shops and pubs, in construction and as a surf instructor — are not that far in the rearview. But it also was the low-stakes, insular world they needed, Teasdale said. The rental was a family’s home, and the “studio” was a kids’ playroom. “So we kind of pushed the little sofas and the toys to the side, and set up our drums, in a way that we could record straight into Joshua’s laptop,” she said.
We met one wind-whipped afternoon in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Teasdale wanted to check out the waterfront. Chambers and much of the band still live on the Isle of Wight, a 45-minute ferry ride from England’s southern coast. But Teasdale moved out to London, where she likes to walk along the canals. Growing up on a small island, “I definitely do gravitate toward water,” she said. “There’s something very calming about the vastness of it, even when it’s a tiny canal.”
Striding around the neighborhood in white rubber wellies the size of moon boots, Teasdale, 32, was amiable, chatting about how she’s teaching herself to cook at home — Japanese, lately — and how she grew up singing, and studying musical theater, but never envisioned a full career performing. She also radiated unmistakable rock star swagger.
Her outfit was bananas, in the best way: a tank top under a giant faux fur coat; an infamous London Fashion Week handbag, on loan from the designers Chopova Lowena, that comes with a real jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise buckled onto it; and DSquared undies peeking out from some savagely layered combination of sweats and flannel shorts. (Her stage look was actually boxer briefs tucked under bikini bottoms — two pairs of undies, “for safety,” she joked. “Well, three actually, if you include the ones that I was wearing under my boxers.”)
With dip-dyed tequila-sunrise hair, blue eyes and freckles, she looks like a cross between Brigitte Bardot and Pippi Longstocking — one who has stopped at a cosmetic dentist for some tooth bling; stars glisten every time she speaks.
Before the band hit, Teasdale worked as a commercial wardrobe stylist — she found those white fisherman boots herself, on Amazon — and she’s proud that Wet Leg still curates its own look. “Something that’s really empowering for us is to be able to take our image and present ourselves in the way that we want,” she said. With the videos too, it was about “getting to build this world in which our music lives.”
Her life changed in 2021, when she met her partner (whom she lives with, but declined to name) at a music festival. “It was love at first sight,” she said.
For Teasdale, the realization that she was queer opened up possibilities in her songwriting. “Maybe the subconscious gay in me wouldn’t let me write love songs if it was about my boyfriend or whatever,” she said. It just never seemed interesting to her. (The debut album is full of breakup anthems, though.) And now, “I’m just so, so in love — like painfully — that it was hard to write about anything else.”
There are, of course, the trademark silly Wet Leg lyrics, like one in the ’90s-indie strummer “Liquidize,” about being “a marshmallow worm,” a nickname Teasdale acquired thanks to a certain puffer coat. “We were all just riffing,” she recalled. “‘This one and only girl,’ ‘girl,’ ‘worm,’ ‘marshmallow’ — that’s so dumb. Should we just put it in?”
But in an album replete with imagery about romance, much of the sweetest actually comes from Chambers’s tracks about Mobaraki, her boyfriend of around a decade (including one, “Don’t Speak,” she wrote as him, to her). Working again with the producer Dan Carey (Fontaines D.C.; Foals), who also played synths, the band amped up its sound, just by virtue of being tighter, more propulsive, together. “It’s got some heft,” Teasdale said of the production.
Another leap was its atmospheric 2023 remix of Depeche Mode’s “Wagging Tongue,” which earned Wet Leg a third Grammy.
“We’ve always liked hearing how people reinterpret our music,” Depeche Mode said in an email, “especially when they’re coming from a completely different musical world. And we weren’t let down when we heard what Wet Leg came up with.”
After a period where “we’d all take turns being a bit freaked out and having, like, existential crises” about the scale and pace of their success, Teasdale said, they’ve learned how to manage their artistic life. “Things feel like they’ve just sort of slotted into place,” Mobaraki agreed.
Perhaps nowhere is Wet Leg’s evolution more evident than onstage. Writing the album, Teasdale consciously chose to play less guitar, so she would have more freedom of expression. She was inspired, she said, by watching acts like Caroline Polachek and Mitski at the Glastonbury festival. “These are artists that you really hear every lyric, because of the movement that they accompany it with,” she said. “And it’s just loads of fun.”
With spins and squats, singing directly to an audience member or acting out a chorus, she is a mesmerizing and fierce presence — not least because of the way she struts her hard-earned physique (she has been working with a trainer since the last tour).
Consciously taking up space can feel “very free,” she said. “I think it’s so cool to be strong.”
Melena Ryzik is a roving culture reporter at The Times, covering the personalities, projects and ideas that drive the creative world.
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