How Wet Leg Learned to Love the People ‘Who F–king Hate’ Them — And Recorded Another Grammy Contender

3 weeks ago 2

As she sits successful a edifice successful North Carolina, immoderate 4,000 miles from home, Rhian Teasdale is listing what she misses astir London: a beloved java spot, seeing originative types “milling astir everywhere,” Japanese food, feeding squirrels successful a section park. “Oh, my God,” the Wet Leg frontperson says successful a soft, yawning drawl. “There’s conscionable truthful galore things.”

Over the past fewer years, Teasdale has grown to clasp the dilatory mornings and elemental comforts that travel with being a homebody, and Moisturizer, Wet Leg’s bright, celestial 2nd album, captures small-hours moments, sofa snogs and falling into the buoyant daze of doing thing each day. Some songs are imbued with the trippy delirium of Le Tigre oregon The B-52s, others with the angsty thrust of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, for a postulation defined by a sneakily virtuosic popular sensibility.

“London has fixed maine a caller level of ambition and it’s an astonishing city, but, you know, my bosom belongs to a West Londoner, which gives maine existent crushed to instrumentality around,” Teasdale says. She lets retired a gentle sigh. “Home is wherever my spouse is.”

These whitethorn look similar humble beginnings for 1 of the year’s astir anticipated stone albums, but Moisturizer, which Domino released successful July, finds quiescent spot successful learning however to travel with life’s earthy rhythms. After the breakout occurrence of Wet Leg’s Grammy Award-winning self-titled 2022 debut — and the years spent connected the roadworthy touring down it — Teasdale wanted to constitute astir coming backmost down to world and choosing to unrecorded successful blissful obscurity. One of her top joys is contemplating the committedness of a time disconnected spent with her partner: Will they ticker a movie? Order takeout? Ride the autobus to obscurity successful particular? (She declines to sanction her spouse of 4 years successful interviews.)

Upon release, Moisturizer soared to the acme of the United Kingdom’s Official Albums Chart, No. 6 connected Billboard’s Top Rock & Alternative Albums illustration and No. 45 connected the Billboard 200 — a uncommon feat for a British set connected an autarkic label. Previously a duo consisting of Teasdale and Hester Chambers (guitar), Wet Leg formally expanded to a five-piece for medium two, bringing touring set members Henry Holmes (drums), Josh Mobaraki (guitar, synthesizer) and Ellis Durand (bass) into the fold, each of whom person penning credits connected the caller material.

The giddy indie stylings of the group’s formative years person go much analyzable — without losing their immediacy. Yet what made the enactment an instant occurrence communicative remains the same: Teasdale’s precise, poetic vignettes, which connected Moisturizer scope from a diatribe against s—ty men (“Catch These Fists”) to heartfelt dispatches from Teasdale’s burgeoning romance (“11:21,” “Pokemon”) and the longtime narration betwixt Chambers and Mobaraki (“Don’t Speak”), who antecedently performed unneurotic arsenic alternate duo Sleep Well crossed their autochthonal Isle of Wight, a small, abstracted land disconnected the southbound seashore of England.

“It is usually lone your spouse that you tin beryllium successful comfy soundlessness with, oregon your family. But that’s thing we tin decidedly do. That’s beauteous successful itself,” Teasdale says, describing Wet Leg’s closeness arsenic a unit. “[Working together] is truthful comfy and chill.”