Tom Dunne: Moisturizer from Wet Leg already feels like my album of the year
Rhian Teasdale of Wet Leg on stage at the TRNSMT festival in Glasgow recently. Picture: Lesley Martin/PA Wire
Urban Outfitters, Temple Bar, Dublin, sometime last week. I am in hell. Somehow tricked into accompanying my teenage daughters on a clothes shopping expedition. The music playlist is saving me: early Stones, Velvet Underground, CSNY. It is now heaven.
It reminds me of similar shops in Manhattan in the mid-1990s. The clothes were the same, vintage T-shirts and hoodies; the staff were the same, uber-cool tattooed people; and the music was the same. The only thing changing is me.
I am about to point out this out to my daughters when something new comes on. It is Wet Leg. Of course it is. It fits right in. It’s new and yet it isn’t. It’s part of that lineage, the new iteration. And it is class.
I liked their self-titled debut, but this new record, leaves it in the dirt. It is instantly my new favourite album of 2025. Over to you CMAT to knock this one off the top. It could yet be the BRAT of this year. Rhian Teasdale isn’t Charlie XCX, yet but give her time.
The emergence of Teasdale as the all-conquering, star, front woman, slayer of arena audiences has been one of the most fascinating developments of the last few years. When Wet Leg arrived in 2022, she and bandmate Hester Chambers looked positively rustic.
Theirs was – and yes, I sought help with this bit– a bohemian aesthetic, vintage style white dresses with Doc Martens. There were even cardigans. But not anymore. At some point you got the impression Teasdale was enjoying the attention, and then some.
If you’d missed them since 2022 you might have asked who is that onstage with Wet Leg at Glastonbury? The prairie dresses were gone. Teasdale looked toned and confident, there were new tattoos, a crop top, bleached eyebrows. This was Teasdale 2025, a fully empowered rock icon. Wet Leg 2.0, welcome to the Colosseum.
Wet Leg Version 1 appeared to have just fallen from the skies into rock indie stardom. Formed on the Isle of Wight, they say, on the top of a Ferris Wheel at a music festival, it all just seemed too easy for them.
Chaise Longue was the first single and an instant smash, the first indie band 'overnight success' in a long time. The debut album won two Brits and two Grammies. They toured with Taylor Swift, were covered by Harry Styles, won an Ivor Novello award, and played on Jimmy Fallon.
They toured that album for the guts of three years. If they had emerged from that time with no new songs it would have been no surprise. But they didn’t. They booked an AirBnB last autumn and started to write. The result, for me, is the album of the year.
Two things happened to facilitate this, apart from Teasdale leaning into Front Woman For The Age status. Firstly, they spread the songwriting burden to all five members of the band. Secondly, Teasdale fell in love. Her new partner, identity not revealed, is nonbinary. I don’t know how that feeds into this, but it does.
The songs are spectacular. Yes you can trace their lineage via the Velvet Underground, The Pixies, The Breeders, Franz Ferdinand, the Arctic Monkeys and Alvvays, but so what? That music style might provide the ingredients, but it’s what you with it that counts. And this is where Teasdale’s new relationship status comes up trumps.
A ‘love-inspired’ album could be sickly sweet, but not when it is still in the chemical, all new, crazy passionate phase. I’ll let Teasdale herself paint those pictures, and they are not for the faint-hearted. But God are they great.
These are songs written in the heady first days of a new love. You can feel the danger, the intoxication, the passion, the fun. It’s note perfect. A love you may not survive but which you feel inclined to take your chances with. It’s game on, see you on the other side.
The album never lets up. It is the of indie music 2025. There are no weak tracks, 12 potential singles. The Velvet Underground and bands since have developed the perfect template for this type of music, but it’s what to add to that gives it the X factor.
The 2022 debut was described as the kind of album that would illicit an approving text from your dad. I’d write more but I have to find my phone. I have a text to send.
