Isle of Wight indie rock darlings Wet Leg still strike a power pose, but as they tour their forthcoming album, Moisturizer, a more romantic strain has crept into their songs…
Rhian Teasdale is striking a pose. Wreathed in dry ice, long pale hair whipped around by a fan, she flexes her muscles at the crowd, the backlighting accentuating her statuesque form.
This show of strength from Wet Leg’s singing guitarist has a new song to go with it – Catch These Fists, the band’s comeback track. Released at the start of April, the song maintains their quotient of sardonic put-downs while notching up the group’s threat level. “You should be careful, you catch my drift?” Teasdale sneers.
On this short UK tour that heralds a new album, the band’s defining cottage-core look has gone, replaced by something sleeker, skimpier and more feral. The album art for Wet Leg’s recently announced second outing – Moisturizer, due in July – finds their other singing guitarist, Hester Chambers, hugging herself with her back to the camera. (This is frequently Chambers’s preferred way to deal with attention; live, she often swivels to face the drum riser.)
A horror film version of Teasdale is crouching next to her, facing down the lens like a medieval succubus, all talons, bleached eyebrows and manic glare.
The Isle of Wight’s breakout indie rock darlings have clearly moved on since the release of their self-titled, instant-hit debut of 2022, and even more since it won Wet Leg two Brits and a handful of Grammys, catapulting them into arena tour support slots with the likes of Harry Styles and Foo Fighters. You imagine the chaises longues in Wet Leg’s dressing rooms have only grown longer and more plush, while the warm beer on their rider – both referenced in their earworm of a debut single, Chaise Longue – is now chilled.
Fame has not turned their heads though. Someone has made a “W” and an “L” out of luminous green tape and stuck it to their bass drum. The three hirsute guys who formed Wet Leg’s touring outfit have now officially joined the band.
Even though the US is Wet Leg’s biggest market, they remain homebodies. Like Wet Leg, Moisturizer was once again produced by Dan Carey rather than any LA hotshot they might have been tempted to work with.
The chief concession to this band having had Stateside success beyond the reach of Yard Act or Dry Cleaning – two other UK guitar bands who came up in the same post-pandemic cohort as Wet Leg – seems to be the “z”s that crop up in the album’s title and on the second new track they play tonight, Liquidize.
It would be churlish to grouse about two women unexpectedly finding happiness and writing about it
Reassuringly, though, one of the most nagging new tunes is called Mangetout and not snow peas. On CPR, a track that dropped a few hours before this gig, Teasdale sings of calling “triple nine” in a crisis while the band combine slink with swagger. The self-filmed video for CPR, meanwhile, finds the group driving down a narrow, dry stone- walled B-road in the Isle of Wight. They can still paint a detailed picture with very few words. “Limousine/ Racking up/ Ketamine/ Giddy up,” is one laudably compact couplet.
If the band’s sense of their own Britishness remains intact, Teasdale and Chambers have done a shrieking 180 on matters of the heart. The Leg of old were fed up with the whole sorry business of romance, with men behaving sub-optimally.
“I’m done with love,” Teasdale said in a 2022 Soho House interview, “never again.” Tonight, Wet Leg play Too Late Now, one of a selection from their first album, as something of a reminder of this good-time band’s generalised dissatisfaction. “Well, life’s supposed to be this shit,” rants Teasdale in quick-time, “now everything is going wrong.”
New Leg? Not so much. “How did I get so lucky?” wonders Teasdale on Liquidize, a tune that recalls Kim Deal-era Pixies. Teasdale’s band got big. She fell in love – and not with a man. Chambers is also happily coupled up. The result is a record where, despite some biceps-oiling, Chambers and Teasdale are giving off lover energy, not fighter vibes.
“That was a love song,” deadpans Teasdale, as a swirling, 90s-referencing new guitar track called Pillow Talk wraps. “And this is another love song,” she adds, as a taut pop tune called Davina McCall powers up (another reference for North Americans to research).
It would be churlish to grouse about two women unexpectedly finding happiness and writing about it. But despite initial appearances – the muscles, the strobe lighting, the fighting talk – it feels like some of the tartness has seeped from Wet Leg’s offering. The snark-to-swoon ratio has shifted.
Your ears do prick up with some of the insights that come with Teasdale’s situation – “I can... make you wet like an aquarium,” is one standout lyric. And it helps that no one is more surprised than Wet Leg are at how love ambushed them. “Love struck me down,” ponders Liquidize. “The fuck am I doing here?”
Instead of closing their set with Chaise Longue, Wet Leg climax with their newest song, CPR. Its hammering chorus demands: “Is it love or suicide?” with disbelief. Teasdale answers her own question, using a chunky old cordless phone to mime the emergency call. Breathlessly, ecstatically, she yelps at an imaginary call handler: “I, I, I, I, I I’m in love!”
Photograph by Gary Calton for the Observer
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