"Moisturizer" came out July 11, 2025, on Domino Recording Company, debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, and received a nomination for Best Alternative Music Album at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards, with the track "Mangetout" nominated separately for Best Alternative Music Performance.
Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers formed Wet Leg on the Isle of Wight and released their debut single "Chaise Longue" in June 2021. The song spread quickly across platforms and into press coverage. The self-titled debut album followed in April 2022, debuted at number one in the UK, and won the Mercury Prize in September 2022. Within eighteen months of their first single, the band was headlining major festivals.
"Moisturizer" is the record that proves that trajectory was not an accident.
## What Dan Carey Did This Time [img:]
Dan Carey produced "Moisturizer" as he had produced the debut. This continuity is significant. Carey records live, fast, and loud, and the albums he makes tend to have an immediacy that more carefully produced records lose. His previous clients include Fontaines D.C., Black Midi, and Squid. He runs his own label, Speedy Wunderground, from his studio in south London, and he is one of the central architects of the post punk revival's sonic identity.
For Wet Leg, Carey's approach serves a specific purpose: it keeps the songs from becoming safe. "Moisturizer" is not a careful record. It is loud, occasionally chaotic, consistently funny, and more emotionally direct than its predecessor. The production does not sand down the seams. It shows them, which is the correct call for a band whose best work operates in the friction between sincerity and absurdism.
In a 2025 Billboard interview, Carey described Teasdale and Chambers as "almost telepathic" in the studio. That kind of working relationship, established over two records and three years of continuous touring, is audible in how the arrangements breathe.
## Five Members, One Band [img:]
"Moisturizer" is the first album on which Wet Leg's full lineup functioned as contributors rather than a core duo with touring members. Josh Mobaraki on guitar, Ellis Durand on bass, and Henry Holmes on drums all have writing credits across the record. The result is an album that sounds like a band rather than a duo executing a vision with hired support.
The debut, for all its strengths, had the quality of Teasdale and Chambers's vision being performed by skilled players. "Moisturizer" sounds like a conversation. The arrangements are more confrontational, the dynamic range wider, the willingness to let a song get genuinely difficult before it resolves more present.
The Grammy nominations for both the album and "Mangetout" as a standalone track are a reasonable external validation of what the record accomplished: a band proving that the critical consensus around their debut was not hype.
## Songs That Know What They Are Doing [img:]
The 12 tracks run from "CPR" through "U and Me at Home," none overstaying their welcome and most knowing exactly when to stop. "Davina McCall" works by taking a specific name, the British television presenter, and using it to mean something larger about recognition, performance, and the public gaze. The joke and the genuine feeling coexist without either neutralizing the other.
This double register is Wet Leg's actual skill, the thing that distinguishes them from bands that are merely funny and bands that are merely sincere. They hold both at once without letting either drain the other. Most bands cannot manage this balance for a full record.
"Pokemon," released as a single in December 2025, is probably the clearest example. Entirely straight-faced delivery of an absurd premise that also communicates something real about the pressure of expectation and the wish to be seen as something other than what you are publicly. It resists a purely comic reading. The song will not let you settle on one response.
What the Mercury Prize Connection Actually Did
Winning the Mercury Prize for the debut in 2022 placed Wet Leg in a specific lineage of British guitar bands whose critical recognition outran their commercial profile, at least initially. The Mercury tends to reward albums that the press has already identified as important; it does not often create importance where none existed. In Wet Leg's case the prize confirmed what the touring and the press coverage had already established: that the debut was genuinely good and not simply well-marketed.
The consequence for "Moisturizer" was a higher baseline of expectation and a wider audience that already had an opinion about the band before a note was released. That context could easily produce a defensive second album, one designed to protect what the first one built. Instead it produced something more aggressive, more willing to risk alienating people in the service of making something that felt alive.
## The Third Album Is Already Finished [img:]
In late November 2025, Teasdale confirmed that Wet Leg's third album was complete. The announcement came during press coverage around the Grammy nominations. She indicated the band's intention to release music more quickly than the three-year gap that separated "Wet Leg" from "Moisturizer."
The Coachella appearance in April 2026, where the band performed unreleased material, confirmed the new record exists in concrete form. The Alexandra Palace headline shows scheduled for July 2026 will be the largest UK indoor shows of the band's career to date. If the third album follows the trajectory of "Moisturizer," the argument that Wet Leg are the most important guitar band currently working in Britain becomes very difficult to dispute.
