Wet Leg - the Isle of Wight five-piece founded by Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers - have announced their eagerly anticipated second album moisturizer will be released on July 11th on Domino.
Alongside the album announcement, the band also share the first taste of moisturizer with its frenetic, alluringly combative lead single "catch these fists." Kicking things off with an untameable, electrified groove from its opening seconds, "catch these fists" is dance-punk par excellence - bass notes ricocheting off a wall of howling synth, thunderous beats catching strays from Teasdale's cruel deadpan.
The video, directed by the band and shot on the Isle of Wight, nods to Ti West, Cameron Crowe and their own "Wet Dream" video and is a suitably off-kilter introduction to moisturizer valley. The band will return to The Tonight Showstage at 30 Rockefeller Center on Wednesday, to give the song its international television debut.
Touring with Ellis Durand (bass), Henry Holmes (drums), and Joshua Mobaraki (guitar, synth), Wet Leg developed into a taut, caustic live operation that made good on their debut's success: #1 chart placements at home and abroad, three GRAMMYs, two BRIT Awards and over half a billion streams. If success presents a fork in the road for any new band - to "go pop" or keep following your muse - Wet Leg emphatically chose the latter path - including working with Dan Carey again as their producer. In March 2024, the band decamped to the remote seaside town of Southwold in Norfolk, England, to write; living together, working all day, watching horror movies all night, they soon locked into a new sense of symbiosis. Subsequently, all five members of Wet Leg have writing credits on moisturizer - "We were just kind of having fun and exploring," says Hester Chambers. "We focused on: Is this going to be fun to play live? It was very natural that we would write the second record together" adds Rhian Teasdale.
As happens a couple of times on moisturizer, the major animus behind "catch these fists" was an interaction with a belligerent man, as chronicled in the song's final verse. This is not to say shitty men are the sole focus of moisturizer -- no matter how much album track "mangetout", with its withering chorus of "get lost forever" may feel like the Nicole Kidman divorce photo in song form. On the contrary, this is largely an album about being, as the band exclaim on "pond song", so "DEEP! IN! LOVE!!!!" moisturizer contains love songs of every stripe: stressed-out, gooey-eyed, gratuitously horny, blissed out, obsessive and mysterious.
Although Teasdale previously felt allergic to writing love songs, moisturizer is defined by its sheer exuberance and Teasdale ended up finding the process empowering. That new sense of ownership extends to moisturizer's album art, an instant-classic freak-fest in which Chambers and Teasdale bare long, ghoulish claws; Teasdale, sporting long, kitschy socks and sans eyebrows, grins fiendishly into the camera. It reflects the album, moisturizer is the band turning the dial up and delivering a record that is unapologetically bolder, stronger and raunchier.
