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

As she sits in a hotel in North Carolina, some 4,000 miles from home, Rhian Teasdale is listing what she misses about London: a beloved coffee spot, seeing creative types “milling about everywhere,” Japanese food, feeding squirrels in a local park. “Oh, my God,” the Wet Leg frontperson says in a soft, yawning drawl. “There’s just so many things.”

Over the past few years, Teasdale has grown to embrace the slow mornings and simple comforts that come with being a homebody, and Moisturizer, Wet Leg’s bright, celestial second album, captures small-hours moments, sofa snogs and falling into the buoyant daze of doing nothing all day. Some songs are imbued with the trippy delirium of Le Tigre or The B-52s, others with the angsty drive of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, for a collection defined by a sneakily virtuosic pop sensibility.

“London has given me a new level of ambition and it’s an amazing city, but, you know, my heart belongs to a West Londoner, which gives me real reason to stick around,” Teasdale says. She lets out a gentle sigh. “Home is where my partner is.”

These may seem like humble beginnings for one of the year’s most anticipated rock albums, but Moisturizer, which Domino released in July, finds quiet strength in learning how to flow with life’s natural rhythms. After the breakout success of Wet Leg’s Grammy Award-­winning self-titled 2022 debut — and the years spent on the road touring behind it — Teasdale wanted to write about coming back down to earth and choosing to live in blissful obscurity. One of her greatest joys is contemplating the promise of a day off spent with her partner: Will they watch a movie? Order takeout? Ride the bus to nowhere in particular? (She declines to name her partner of four years in interviews.)

Upon release, Moisturizer soared to the summit of the United Kingdom’s Official Albums Chart, No. 6 on Billboard’s Top Rock & Alternative Albums chart and No. 45 on the Billboard 200 — a rare feat for a British band on an independent label. Previously a duo consisting of Teasdale and Hester Chambers (guitar), Wet Leg formally expanded to a five-piece for album two, bringing touring band members Henry Holmes (drums), Josh Mobaraki (guitar, synthesizer) and Ellis Durand (bass) into the fold, all of whom have writing credits on the new material.

The giddy indie stylings of the group’s formative years have become more complex — without losing their immediacy. Yet what made the act an instant success story remains the same: Teasdale’s precise, poetic vignettes, which on Moisturizer range from a diatribe against s—ty men (“Catch These Fists”) to heartfelt dispatches from Teasdale’s burgeoning romance (“11:21,” “Pokemon”) and the longtime relationship between Chambers and Mobaraki (“Don’t Speak”), who previously performed together as alternative duo Sleep Well across their native Isle of Wight, a small, separate island off the south coast of England.

“It is usually only your partner that you can sit in comfortable silence with, or your family. But that’s something we can definitely do. That’s beautiful in itself,” Teasdale says, describing Wet Leg’s closeness as a unit. “[Working together] is so comfy and chill.”

Today, Teasdale has just rolled off a tour bus that has been making its way down the East Coast. Earlier in the week, the band headlined a sold-out show at the 5,000-capacity SummerStage in New York’s Central Park, a city that feels like “a home from home” for the 32-year-old. Before we speak, Instagram Stories from Wet Leg’s touring crew show her immersed in a swirl of late-night chaos, posing with supersize cocktails and singing her lungs out to Britney Spears’ “Gimme More” in a taxi.

These scenes of pure, unfettered joy bear particular emotional significance for Wet Leg. The band toured its debut for almost three years, blinkingly, through an overwhelming fog; the period encompassed three U.S. headline tours as well as support slots for major acts including Harry Styles and Foo Fighters. In summer 2022, the group canceled shows, citing burnout. “Our mental and physical health are such easy things to overlook when everything is so exciting and so busy,” the members said in a statement at the time.

The same album scored two Grammys (best alternative music album, best alternative music performance) and two BRIT Awards (best new artist, group of the year), as well as two hit singles, “Chaise Longue” and “Wet Dream.” It put the band on high-profile radio playlists, secured it TV appearances on both sides of the Atlantic and sent it to festivals that the musicians had always dreamed of playing, including Glastonbury. Things got so hectic, Teasdale remembers, that she had to ask her then-housemates to move her belongings and tour keepsakes to a new flat on her behalf. Amid the chaos, the idea of “home” had fallen by the wayside entirely.

“I built this [current U.S.] tour up in my head to be really scary,” Teasdale explains. “When we first started touring the first album and everything kicked off, it was so unexpected. It was just mad. I could never have imagined getting to go to America with the band; we were just wanting to bop around some little English festivals. Being able to tour has changed all our lives completely, but there was just this adjustment period of knowing how to live life on tour and what to expect.”

Wet Leg developed a more sustainable approach when it decided to take Moisturizer around the world. The act now stays in hotels that include gyms, while Teasdale actively seeks out and signs up for workout classes in each tour city. During the live show, the band now has a more playful aura; its left-field antics sometimes include being joined onstage by a lengthy prosthetic worm or a towering, Bigfoot-style figure. Framed by her Pepto-pink hair — another Moisturizer-era change — Teasdale bodyrolls and thrashes around, singing so wildly that the edges of her mouth seem to disappear.

Being back onstage and in touch with their audience — which is increasingly populated by young women and queer people, Teasdale notes — has been intense but joyous, a firework explosion of fresh energy after a very difficult time. “Our first album was 30 minutes long and we would get booked for hourlong slots sometimes, and it was just impossible to fill the time,” she says. “But if you don’t know what it is that you’re getting into, how can you ask for help?”

Wet Leg’s rocket-speed rise to fame in 2021, which aligned with a post-lockdown desire to shake off the quarantine blues and revel in guitar music, rankled conspiratorial online music fans who questioned the band’s authenticity. In the United Kingdom, social media exacerbated this narrative, depriving Teasdale and Chambers of the necessary space to privately reckon with their sudden fame. As the accolades rolled in, they appeared perpetually shell-shocked on camera and red carpets, often at a loss of words when asked to describe how it felt to be the most acclaimed new act in the world.

“When you’ve got an online presence of a certain level, the algorithm is going to show your stuff to people who f–king hate you,” Teasdale says. “Though it’s a really positive thing that someone would have such a strong reaction to your music or your presence.”

Having vaulted from the local music scene to international stardom in the space of a year, Teasdale came to realize that in-demand musicians, especially young women, are expected to be available, relatable, always on — and it fostered some imposter syndrome. “Recording that first album, I just remember feeling sick to my stomach,” she says. “I was always so nervous, like, ‘I shouldn’t be here.’ ”

Produced by longtime collaborator Dan Carey (Fontaines D.C., Caroline Polachek), Moisturizer makes subtle references to this discomfiting period. “Maybe we could start a band as some kinda joke/‘Well, that didn’t quite go to plan,’ I say on the radio,” Teasdale sings to a sweetly melancholy tune on album closer “U and Me at Home”; “I was a small-town girl tryna make it big,” she posits on “Pond Song.” The self-reflective tone marks a thematic shift for a band whose debut radiated a cool irony, pulling emotional punches in favor of observations centered around mid-20s delusion.

Looking back, it wasn’t until Wet Leg opened for Harry Styles at his summer 2023 shows, including four nights at London’s iconic Wembley Stadium, that Teasdale felt as though the chaos had started to subside and that boundaries with fans could be set. “Obviously, that tour was really crucial for getting our name out there,” Teasdale says, “but all his fans were so respectful. You’d get stopped by a young girl [outside a venue] and they’d say, ‘Excuse me, please, could I have a photo? It’s OK if you don’t want one.’

“Whereas, I think before then, we got used to people not asking us that question,” she continues. “People would just be so entitled and would come up to us with their phones out already…” She trails off. “I don’t know, it was really fun playing the Harry shows. They were not at all overwhelming. The sense of community we felt with the audience was so cool.” Notably, Styles’ cover of “Wet Dream” for BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge also helped the track become Wet Leg’s most popular on Spotify, with more than 160 million streams today.

A fresh start prompted a radical rethink. Teasdale describes how, when handing in production notes for Moisturizer, a Domino A&R executive asked her if she had revisited Wet Leg’s debut. She hadn’t — but when she did, what she found was a record that felt “unsure of itself,” she says.

Moisturizer’s confidence level feels light-years away from its predecessor — and starts with their respective album artwork. On Wet Leg, Teasdale and Chambers were pictured with their backs to the camera. This time around, while Chambers remains turned away, Teasdale crouches with an unsettling smile and long fingernails, conjuring a skin-crawling suspense. This aesthetic switch-up is a far cry from Wet Leg’s previous cottage-core fantasy, but Teasdale says she was less interested in shock value than in interrogating her ever-evolving artistic identity.

“I get so many weird little DMs from men being like, ‘Go back to how you used to look!’ ” she says with a laugh, alluding to her days wearing billowing skirts and bonnets. Now she likes to flex her muscles onstage, flaunt her armpit hair and, at a recent show, wore a vest that read “I Heart Incels.” But provocation has long been part of Teasdale’s oeuvre: In the late 2010s, as the solo artist RHAIN, she played with sequin-soaked looks and posed nude for a press shot.

Moisturizer’s considered, holistic aesthetic, which spans grungy androgyny and surrealism, has blossomed in tandem with “a big epiphany” for Teasdale: discovering her queerness. (Her partner is nonbinary.) This is a record of warmth and passion, one that hangs on the conviction that nobody has ever felt so consumed by the dizzy, wild and blissed-out rush of infatuation.

Her journey chimes with the idea that ­after ­coming out, queer people may experience a “second adolescence” where dating feels more vivid and liberated. “It’s like a veil has been lifted,” Teasdale says. “I really do feel a newfound sense of freedom. It’s a feeling that has been significant in my life recently.”

In the studio, surrounded by her bandmates, she cried while recording the love song “Davina McCall.” Teasdale reworked the lyrics to “Liquidize,” another track about her relationship, when it unearthed overwhelming feelings she hadn’t contended with before. On “U and Me at Home,” which features a joyful blast of the band members screaming together, her voice sounds richer, deeper and more nuanced; still recognizable, but altered by emotion.

Working on these inward-looking songs has allowed Teasdale and Chambers to feel less hemmed in by their origin story, one that was drawn early on by the press and then chiseled in stone. “During that first campaign we had a lot more heat on us than we do now,” Teasdale says of growing alongside her best friend. “We are very protective of each other. We have a sisterly relationship.”

The rest of the fall will be spent on a victory lap. The band members’ schedule is full of the kind of moments that they only could have imagined for themselves while growing up on the Isle of Wight, a place where “you can only dream so big,” as Teasdale puts it. After the U.S. tour, there’s a run of U.K. and European dates, including a prestigious headline slot at Scotland’s Hogmanay celebrations in Edinburgh, which will see them ring in the new year together onstage.

But before then? In keeping with her wellness-first touring routine, Teasdale is heading for the salon after our call. “It’s like a homely, comfy thing to do, getting your nails done,” she says, sounding at total ease.

This story appears in the Oct. 4, 2025, issue of Billboard.