Wet Leg Brings It On

Rhian Teasdale sits down in a West London cafe with three drinks in front of her: a water, a coffee, and a lemonade. One for hydration, one for caffeine, and one just for fun. They’re all very necessary. It’s the hottest day of the year so far in England — only 88 degrees, but have you heard we don’t have air conditioning? — so the glass box we’ve found ourselves in overlooking the canal is basically a greenhouse. It’s also the day after Glastonbury, and Teasdale is still recovering from playing the iconic festival’s second biggest stage, the Other Stage, for the first time with her band, Wet Leg.

“I apologize for my brain!” she says between sips. With a new album, Moisturizer, dropping this Friday, Teasdale wasn’t sure how the gig was going to go. “It was really nerve-wracking to play new songs because you don’t know how they’re going to be received or if people are going to find them boring,” she says. “Slowly, you do notice people, even though the song isn’t out, they’ve learned the lyrics, which is just such a nice, mad feeling.”

The last time Wet Leg performed there was in 2022, just two months after the band released its self-titled debut, but Teasdale and band co-founder Hester Chambers hardly needed to prove themselves: The crowd knew every word. When they performed their Grammy-winning, Iggy Pop-approved hit “Chaise Longue,” Teasdale and Chambers looked in disbelief as fans sang along so loudly, they almost drowned out Teasdale’s trademark understated drawl.

Back then, the pair — who would go on to open for Foo Fighters and Harry Styles — were dressed in Wet Leg’s unofficial uniform: cotton prairie dresses down to their ankles, minimal makeup, long braids adorned in ribbons. Their twee femininity was a clever contrast to their songs, which are filled with irreverent lyrics about pop culture, being horny, and how men really ain’t sh*t.

“Seeing this sh*t in the comments really motivates me to double down and grow my armpit hair even more.”

Fast-forward three years, and the Rhian Teasdale that emerged on the Glasto stage has gone through more than a few transformations. “Cottagecore is over. We’ve moved on,” Teasdale, 32, says with a laugh. She’s dyed her long brown hair pale pink, bleached her eyebrows, and traded flowing dresses for hot pants and muscle tanks, skin-tight looks and biker boots. (“The eyebrows were the first to go,” she says.) She’s also jacked now, a product of a newfound interest in lifting at the gym, and a little more comfortable f*cking around with femininity — she’s in her first queer relationship after meeting her partner (whose identity she keeps private) at a music festival in 2021.

“Some people are just so angry,” she says about the response to her new look. “Particularly men. The cottagecore was sweet and kind of femme enough. [They were like,] ‘This is cool. This is for me. It’s a little bit cheeky. It’s a little bit sexual.’ That was fine. And now that I’m showing a bit more skin, and I’ve got armpit hair and I’ve got muscles, it just feels like it’s really threatening to them.”

It’s true. If you head to the comments section of Wet Leg’s latest Instagram posts, you’ll find more than a handful of posts mourning Teasdale’s old aesthetic if not taking actual umbrage at the existence of body hair. “I think it’s really nice,” says Teasdale, sounding unfazed; in conversation, she is sweet and surprisingly soft-spoken. “Seeing this sh*t in the comments, it just really motivates me to double down and, like, grow my armpit hair even more.”

“We’ve tried doing all the photo shoots together, doing all the promo together. We are definitely in a much better place.”

“I think it’s really important for our audience to see the negative comments and the positive comments,” she adds. “Because I could just go into the comments and delete all the negative ones, but then I just think that would be creating a false sense of security. I think people need to know that the patriarchy is still very much alive and kicking.”

There’s another big change Wet Leg has gone through, and one that inspires its own chatter in the comments: Where is Hester? Teasdale and Chambers started making music together in their home turf of the Isle of Wight, which, though only a mile or so off the south coast of the United Kingdom, maintains a sense of semi-secluded otherness that allowed Wet Leg’s brand of whimsy to thrive — and added a dash of mystique to their origin story.

When everything took off for Wet Leg, including hitting No. 1 on the U.K. album charts and winning multiple Brit and Grammy awards, Teasdale and Chambers were always side-by-side, soaking it in. As they headed into their second album, the duo expanded to officially include members of their live band — Henry Holmes, Josh Mobaraki, and Ellis Durand — while Chambers, who has been open about her anxiety and the way unexpected fame exacerbated it, has purposefully retreated into the background. In promotional photos for Moisturizer, she partially covers her face, and on stage at Glastonbury, she frequently turned to play the guitar to the back of the stage. As a result, Teasdale has stepped into a position she never expected: official frontwoman of Wet Leg.

“We’ve tried doing everything,” Teasdale says of the band’s early days, when saying yes felt paramount. “We’ve tried doing all the photo shoots together, and we’ve tried doing all the promo together. I think being able to set boundaries and knowing what we do want to do and don’t want to do has been really great.”

“When you meet icons, the worst thing that can happen is you get a sense of jadedness. With Harry, the spark is very much still alive.”

Far from there being any hard feelings, Teasdale is thankful that they’ve been able to find a healthy way to evolve as a band. “We are definitely in a much better place,” she says. “We still do very much [have each other], even more so because we’re both just in much better, happier places.” It shows on Moisturizer, which makes a hard turn from their last album’s sardonic takes on single life and dives head first into butterflies-in-your-stomach ain’t-love-grand territory. With the duo both in happy relationships — Chambers is with bandmate Mobaraki — they zero in on domestic bliss and the mundane yet romantic pleasures of, say, your partner cooking you a roast chicken.

Being the face of Wet Leg is something Teasdale’s still getting used to. Even the solo photo shoot for this story is only the second time she’s done one without the comfort of her bandmates. Would Teasdale have been able to shoulder all the red carpets and interviews alone during that first wave of attention?

She takes a moment to ponder the question, tapping the side of her lemonade can with her nails. “I think we did have to go through doing everything together, and trying to do this exposure therapy,” she says. “We had to go through that to kind of get to the place where we are.”

“I could go into the comments and delete the negative ones, but that would be creating a false sense of security.”

If being the frontwoman has a learning curve, she’s at least been able to study up with the best of them. When Wet Leg jumped on the European leg of Harry Styles’ Love on Tour spectacle, Teasdale discovered a completely new and alien world of pop fandom. She’d see familiar faces in the crowd every night who followed the singer from stadium to stadium, and she also took in a thriving female-centric and queer community peppered from the pit to the nosebleeds.

“I just had no idea of that culture at all. It was so cute,” she says. “I really wish that I had that when I was young. I was just frothing over these little indie-rock sweatbox gigs with loads of horrible old men.”

Teasdale’s friendship with Styles started when he covered the group’s mammoth hit “Wet Dream” in BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge, and the pair still maintain a close bond; eagle-eyed fans recently spotted them hanging out together in Portugal. Through knowing Styles, Teasdale says she’s found a model for still enjoying what you’re doing, even when you’re up for public consumption.

“When you meet icons, the worst thing that can happen is you get a sense of jadedness from them,” she says. “But with Harry, the spark is very much still alive, and I think that’s so inspiring.”

It’s a reminder she’ll be holding onto — especially in a summer jam-packed with tour dates and festival slots, one of which she’ll have to leave for at 7 a.m. the next day. Before that, Teasdale’s got a mountain of Glastonbury laundry to get through. She dusts off her last drink and laughs. “How can there be so much of it?!” The life of a frontwoman, it turns out, isn’t always so glamorous.

Top image credits: Fruity Booty top, Talent’s own jewelry