Boldly living: Vicariously through Wet Leg’s moisturizer.
If Wet Leg’s self-titled debut felt like a perfectly timed inside joke, their second album, moisturizer, sounds like the moment the joke wears thin. That’s not because it isn’t funny anymore, but because it’s suddenly being repeated back to you by strangers. Clocking in at just under forty minutes across twelve tracks, moisturizer is sharper, harsher, and more restless than its predecessor, less interested in novelty and more invested in saying something honest and real.
As a now fully realized five-piece group (members including Rhian Teasdale, Hester Chambers, Josh Mobaraki, Ellis Durand, and Henry Holmes), Wet Leg leans into the tension of being watched. The irony is still there, but no longer acts as a shield. Instead, moisturizer explores desire, intimacy, and self-awareness in a way that feels blunt rather than dreamy, or better grounded rather than psychedelic. Love and attention are not romanticized; they are examined, resisted, and even mocked.
The album’s emotional thesis arrives early on “mangetout,” a song that encapsulates the central focus of moisturizer. Teasdale’s delivery is unapologetically bold with “You wanna f*** me? I know most people do,” but the confidence quickly curdles into exhaustion. Being wanted is not portrayed as empowering so much as invasive, flattening, and expected. “Get out the way” is a way for Teasdale to reclaim her power that she doesn’t find from this superficial attention or love. The humor is sharp, but there’s an unimpeachable irritation underneath it, a sense that constant desire leaves little room to exist as anything else. If the band’s debut flirted with this idea of detachment, “mangetout” confronted it head-on – the cost of being reduced to a spectacle.
The confrontation softens slightly on “U and Me at Home,” where the band turns inward, trading bravado for domestic closeness. The song captures a type of intimacy pure in its mundane form: staying in, avoiding the outside world, finding comfort in repetition. There’s still self-awareness here, but it’s gentler, maybe even self-mocking, as the band acknowledges how small and ordinary a connection can be when the noise dies out. It’s
a quiet counterpoint to the album’s louder moments, grounding its restlessness in something lived in.
“Davina McCall” offers one of the album’s most sincere moments, stripping away much of the band’s usual irony. The song lingers in vulnerability without rushing to undercut it, allowing for softness to exist on its own terms. The band doesn’t dwell here for long, but
the refrain is what makes the song effective. Sincerity appears, is acknowledged, and then passes through understated and unresolved.
That sense of movement carries into “Pokemon,” a track that embodies the album’s emotional drift. Feelings surface briefly before slipping away, never fully named or pinned down. Rather than building toward catharsis, the song lets ambiguity remain intact, reinforcing the album’s broader refusal to explain itself to anyone. moisturzier isn’t interested in closure but in motion.
Throughout its runtime, the album sheds the safety of novelty without abandoning what made Wet Leg compelling as a band in the first place. The humor still lands, the hooks still stick, but the album feels more exposed, honest, less concerned with virality and more focused on navigating relationships, attention, and desire as they actually feel. It’s an album that doesn’t ask to be decoded so much as experienced, passing by like scenery through a train window: fleeting, messy, and unmistakably human.
Review by Wilhelmina Ratto
