When Wet Leg played at Electric Picnic in 2023, the band’s frontwoman, Rhian Teasdale, remarked that it was probably time they went away and wrote new songs. Two years later they return with a second album that excels as a bigger, brasher reboot of its predecessor – topped off with flashes of joy and sincerity largely absent from their brash and bouncy self-titled debut.
Moisturizer is, first and foremost, a fantastic second LP from musicians who, having experienced a dizzying overnight rise, could have easily fallen victim to a backlash. But such a fate feels unlikely given the new project’s store of beautifully catchy tunes. Spry, hummable melodies abound, paired with furious guitars and often introspective, occasionally gushing lyrics.
This isn’t to say the shin-kicking Wet Leg behind hilarious breakout single Chaise Longue and take-no-prisoners tracks such as Ur Mum have entirely absented themselves. That tongue-in-cheek quality is still there, and the group would no doubt be horrified to think that they’ve “grown up”. (Their humour was plenty adult to begin with.)
But, while retaining their irreverence, there is still lots of progress here – some of it spurred, no doubt, by the expansion of what was once a duo of Teasdale and her friend Hester Chambers into a fully fledged five-piece that now also includes Joshua Mobaraki on guitar, Ellis Durand on bass and Henry Holmes on drums.
Moisturizer also harks back to the underappreciated tradition of pop stars trying on a new look for each album. Remember when Madonna would reinvent herself with her latest record? Wet Leg attempt something similar here – or at least Teasdale, a former film stylist’s assistant, does.
At that Electric Picnic slot in 2023 she sported a trucker cap and T-shirt, the uniform of deadpan hipsters everywhere. That look has been replaced by one more transgressive and scary. Teasdale has hit the gym, dyed her hair and bounced back into action, looking like an up-and-coming boxer who’d knock your block off given half the chance.
She certainly puts plenty of welly into the songs. Moisturizer begins with the pummelling rush of CPR, a steaming-hot chunk of classic alternative rock driven by forceful guitar and Teasdale’s laconic vocals.
The lyrics are about love, a theme threaded through a record informed by the singer’s reconciliation with her queerness and her passion for her nonbinary partner. But these sentiments are never expressed cloyingly. The whole point of CPR is that the violent onrushing of new love can be a bit like a heart attack.
“Put your mouth to mine and give me CPR / Call the triple nine and give me CPR,” she sings – playfully yet with a delightful vehemence.
Just as Fontaines DC jumped forward creatively – and, better yet, abandoned all that “Joycean” nonsense – between the first and second LPs, so Wet Leg have synthesised all that was great about them the first time around and refined it brilliantly with Moisturizer.
It pogos with real punk energy, too. The single Catch These Fists has the wonderfully direct chorus of “Man down!” while Davina McCall is a sugary love song driven by spiky riffs.
Mercifully, there isn’t much navel-gazing about the price of fame – a second-album cliche that the group have been careful to avoid. Teasdale does touch on her experience of being objectified on Catch These Fists, singing, “Don’t approach me / I just wanna dance with my friends.”
In general, however, the defining quality is fun. The boisterously brisk Pokemon builds to a feverish chorus where Teasdale insists that she doesn’t “want to take it slow”.
The delirium of new love is replaced by the homespun comfort of quality time with your significant other on the album’s closing track, U and Me at Home. Here Teasdale celebrates the pleasure of kicking back on a couch with her lover (“maybe we could order in”) – a sweet ending to a record that, amid all the thrills and spills, is ultimately defined by a sense of pure, uncomplicated joy.
