Wet Leg drop their highly anticipated sophomore album, moisturizer, today (July 11), mere days after their lauded performance at Glastonbury Festival, which saw co-guitarist and now main vocalist Rhian Teasdale wield a quirky acrylic B.C. Rich Mockingbird.
In the space of a few short years, Wet Leg have become one of the hottest indie guitar rock acts on the planet – and that's quite an achievement, owing to the fact Teasdale didn't play guitar until the band was formed.
“I don’t expect to get to the status of guitar hero,” Wet Leg co-founder and Teasdale's co-guitarist Hester Chambers reflected during an interview with Guitar World in 2022.
“I think it might have come more from the fact that we love guitar music. It definitely sparked something in us seeing bands like Big Thief, and just listening to The Strokes and Kings Of Leon growing up. But it’s really fun to let go of our insecurities. We can say, ‘We’re not like those people, we’re not technical but we can still write songs and play gigs.’”
And while Chambers was an accomplished guitarist pre-Wet Leg, Teasdale fell into playing guitar because of the band.
“Something that really blows my mind is that before Wet Leg, Rhian didn’t know how to play guitar,” Chambers commented with a smile.
“She’s excellent at writing songs on a piano but had never done it on a guitar. She was like, ‘I’m gonna write on guitar,’ and it just kind of happened. She’s got a really beautiful way of playing and writing. She’s not restricted, not like, ‘Oh, I need to learn these chords so I can make this song.’ She just kind of plays around.”
Fast forward to 2025, and Teasdale is leading the pack – which now includes long-serving touring musicians Henry Holmes, Josh Mobaraki, and Ellis Durand as official members of the band – with a guitar typically associated with metal and worlds away from the Surf Green Jazzmaster she was associated with in the band's previous era.
This is far from a brand-new phenomenon, as the past couple of years have seen many non-metal acts embrace the allure of metal guitars.
