Rhian Teasdale

A Wet Leg show usually begins like this: Rhian Teasdale strides to the front of the stage, stands in the centre and poses, still and fierce, like a bodybuilder. The band have been opening their sets with a song called “Catch These Fists”, an indie-disco bop about getting chatted up by a creep on a night out. Its upbeat chorus ends with a declaration of war: “I don’t want your love, I just wanna fight!” Rhian sings it while flexing her biceps and staring into the crowd. She loves a pop show – “Catch These Fists” was inspired by getting chatted up in a bar after a Chappell Roan gig – and believes that if people are going to spend money on a ticket the performer should make it a spectacle. “It just doesn’t feel enough to turn up in your tracksuit and play the songs,” she says, adding, “that’s not the kind of shows that I enjoy going to any more.”

We’re in a west London pub close to Rhian’s flat in the week before Christmas; revellers around us noisily celebrate the end of the working year. Rhian has clocked off herself, having flown home yesterday from Los Angeles. Wet Leg had been playing on a whistle-stop tour of US radio stations, merrily wishing Denver, Portland, Chicago and more a happy holiday. Former President Barack Obama is a fan and once included the band on his annual summer playlist. Rhian might be tired, but she has already been to the gym this morning – those muscles don’t look after themselves – and there is little sign of jet lag other than the strong coffee in front of her.

Wet Leg formed in the Isle of Wight in 2019 and over the past few years have become that rare phenomenon: a good oldfashioned chart-topping British indie band who have managed to conquer the US. It almost never happens in these days of pop dominance, but they’ve pulled it off. Hayley Williams, of the Grammy-winning rock band Paramore, recruited Wet Leg to cover Paramore’s track “C’est Comme Ça” for the 2023 remix album, Re: This Is Why. “Rhian is so captivating as a frontperson. I love that she continues to evolve in her own presentation,” Williams tells me. “Love the album, the melodies, the lyrics, the whole feeling. She has the kind of energy that makes you lean towards her.” Today, Rhian is layered up in a black hoodie, a combat jacket and a fluffy-collared aviator coat topping fishnets and knee-high boots, her hair slicked down, her eyebrows bleached. There is an emphatic otherworldliness to the 33-year-old. As a singer and guitarist on stage she is strident and commanding, but off stage she is softly spoken, thoughtful and occasionally less sure of herself than you might expect.

Rhian’s public persona has shifted slightly over her years in the spotlight. In the early days she and Hester Chambers, her fellow singer and guitarist, co-fronted the band. Though Wet Leg is a five-piece, Rhian and Chambers mostly wrote the songs, and they appeared as a duo in all the artwork. At the start of 2025, as they prepared to release their second album, Chambers decided to stop doing interviews completely, and she now mostly performs facing the back of the stage. “Badass,” Rhian whispers to me in awe. As their roles have shifted, Rhian has stepped forward and taken on the role of frontwoman, though she is reluctant to claim this for herself. “I guess? I don’t know. I do find it quite hard to take up that amount of space sometimes.”

Wet Leg have toured extensively over the past 12 months, and being at the front of the stage has been both liberating and challenging. “But it’s good to do things that scare you, otherwise it gets boring,” Rhian says. Starting their live set in her power pose, a stance that means business, allows her to enjoy herself while she’s up there. “To know that’s how I’m gonna begin every night has allowed me to relax into the experience a lot more.”

It has taken time to get here. Rhian grew up in Merseyside. Her parents divorced when she was eight, and her mother moved with Rhian, the youngest, and her two sisters (their brother stayed in Liverpool) to the Isle of Wight, where their grandparents lived. She studied music at sixth-form college, where she met Chambers. In her early 20s, Rhian performed solo, living in Bristol, where she supported acts such as Katy J Pearson. After moving to London in 2018, she worked as a cocktail waitress at a “crazy-golf place in the City. The clientele was the worst ever, as you can imagine – endless jokes about balls and holes.” She then worked as a wardrobe assistant, mostly on ads and occasionally on music videos. She and Chambers would play in each other’s musical projects. Eventually, that year, they decided to form a band, mostly so that they could have fun with it. In the summer of 2021 Wet Leg, by then signed to Domino records, released their first single, “Chaise Longue”. It was a weird, sharp, off-kilter earworm with deadpan lyrics about buttered muffins and warm beer, and totally irresistible. The band spent the best part of two years touring their debut album, Wet Leg, and supporting Harry Styles and Foo Fighters in arenas. In 2023 they won three Grammy Awards, for best alternative music album, alternative music performance and new artist, and over the pond, at the 2023 Brits, they won best new artist and group of the year. That night they performed with the folk dancers of the all-female Boss Morris, with a clever production centred around paganism, Englishness and a concept of going backwards and forwards in time. But there’s another layer to Wet Leg, which is that it’s not all so deep. They formed to have fun, after all, and they do it well.

“With album one it was funny, because people would be asking, ‘What’s the meaning behind “Chaise Longue”?’” Rhian tells me. “And I guess there is meaning, but I don’t think it needs to be spoken about. It’s not that deep. And that’s part of the meaning.” It remains their biggest song by far, with well over 100 million streams on Spotify alone. Given that it was such a huge hit, I wonder what her relationship to the song is now? She is silent for a long time. “I don’t know,” she says, finally. “We play it third to last in our set now.” Where was it before? “Last. It would always be last.”

Their second album, Moisturizer, came out last year. At first, Rhian was apprehensive about whether the new songs would strike a chord with people in the same way “or whether we were going to be stuck in ‘Chaise Longue’-land,” she says. But the fans took to Moisturizer. “I feel like they made the perfect sophomore album,” Hayley Williams says. The album appeared high on several publications’ best-of-the-year lists and received three more Grammy nominations in the US. “I’m really proud of the second album, and it’s connecting with people new and old,” Rhian says. “So ‘Chaise Longue’ is just another song in the set for me now, and I look forward to it.”

The band were already a success when they released their second album, so they could take a minute to figure out what worked for them and what didn’t. “I think the first time it was very high highs and low lows, because it was this big adjustment,” Rhian says. “This time it’s just been pretty straight cruisin’.” Moisturizer went straight to number one in the UK album charts. That summer the band played Glastonbury Festival’s Other Stage, second only to the Pyramid Stage in size. “That was big, because you can get booked for a big stage, but that doesn’t mean anyone’s going to turn up. And people actually showed up. So that was a big taking-stock moment.”

On the newer songs she plays less guitar, which leaves her with space to move. “I’ve got more freedom of expression through my body. And I’d seen Mitski, and I’d seen Caroline Polachek, and I really admire how they move and how they interpret the song through their bodies. I suddenly had space to use my whole body to expand the storytelling in the lyrics.” Her stage clothes look as if they have been lifted from an American sports catalogue and repurposed into a kind of armour. In wearing them, she has discovered a new source of strength. She used to work in a cafe, she tells me, “and I would go in in the most foul mood, and then I’d be serving customers, so I’d have to smile. Obviously, you don’t have to, but that’s the way that I’ve been conditioned and socialised, so...” She operates on the same principle when performing. She likens it to becoming a character, almost an alter ego.

“I enlisted the help of Liv Lockwood, a movement coach, to take my first steps into a more front-facing role,” Rhian says. “Our sessions take place in my living room – me and Liv in our socks!” They go through the songs line by line and workshop movement ideas. “Before big, scary shows like Glastonbury, I spent time imagining myself in front of all those people, stepping out on to the Other Stage. It felt a bit like stepping off a cliff, but it really helped.”

At that time, Wet Leg were on a hiatus from touring and Rhian had a lot of downtime. She is careful to point out how rare it is to be a musician today and not need another job, but she has that freedom, and it’s left her with “a big expanse of time. You go from one extreme to the other. When you’re on tour you’re told exactly what to do, and it’s very regimented.” She tried to enjoy her time off, but her friends were at work and there was nobody to hang out with. “I gradually became quite stressed out. So for my mental health I started working out,” she says. “It was really helpful for me to get up, know I’d be going to be at the gym for 9am for an hour, and then do whatever else I needed to do that day.”

Rhian lifts weights, and her fitness regime has drastically changed her relationship to her body. “When I was a lot younger, in my early 20s, I used to go on the treadmill, which shows you all the calories, and I became really obsessed with that.” She had periods of restricted eating and “feeling awful about myself and my body”, which, she says sadly, is far from unique. “I literally don’t have a single friend who hasn’t had some sort of run-in with their eating, which is such a waste of time.” Training for strength, as she does now, with a personal trainer – “Venus, and she is amazing” – has been huge for her. “It’s nice to reclaim exercising, and for it to be helpful and healthy feels like a big win for me personally.” Similarly, meeting her partner made a big difference to her self-image and self-esteem. “They make me feel so good about myself. They make me feel so absolutely perfect the way I am, regardless of whether I go to the gym or not.”

Rhian met Lava La Rue, who is non-binary, at the end of 2021 at a music festival where both were performing. It was love at first sight. A number of songs on Moisturizer are about falling deeply and sincerely in love. “I love love,” she says dreamily. A single, “Davina McCall” – named after the British television presenter – is a soft ballad of romance and domestic bliss. “Sometimes you look out into the crowd and you see people singing it to each other. It’s so cute.” McCall was thrilled to be namechecked. “She was really sweet about it. We exchanged a few voice notes.”

Before meeting La Rue, Rhian “was always trying to be as feminine as possible” in how she looked and dressed “and never quite succeeding in that,” she says. “Discovering my queerness made me want to explore how I presented myself.” The early days of Wet Leg saw Rhian and Chambers in folky, floaty dresses, though they always had a veneer of strangeness, as if about to reveal that they were actually on the set of a horror film. “When I look back, I just look really straight,” Rhian says. “Which I was!”

In the subsequent years her style has changed, both onstage and off. “When I put on some of the outfits that I used to love and feel quite comfortable in, they feel very strange to me, like putting on someone else’s skin.” She shows me the heavy silver chain she is wearing today. “I really like wearing it because I associate it with, like, lads down the pub.”

She has a handbag with her that she picked up at a flea market in California on her most recent trip to the US. It is in the shape of a small black-and-white dog, but look closely and the dog is on the wonky side. Rhian grins, showing off the jewels stuck to her teeth. She liked the bag when she bought it, but she made a few changes. She unpicked the stitches, turned it inside out and sewed it back together again, its nose a little off-centre, its seams scruffy and exposed.

Stitched to the front of one of Rhian’s jackets is a cannabis leaf. Wet Leg’s off-kilter sense of humour has always seemed a little stonerish, but it turns out that for Rhian, at least, this is ironic. “I actually can’t smoke weed at all,” she confesses. “So I’m just a poser. My partner says it’s because I have a high personality.” She laughs. The inside-out dog handbag on the table suggests that she knows herself well. “I’m already high all the time.”