Wet Leg seduces San Francisco at Outside Lands

The last thing the Land’s End Stage at the Outside Lands festival needed on Friday afternoon was a fog machine, but as UK five-piece Wet Leg were about to take the stage, swaths of artificial mist were pumped onto the Golden Gate Park stage and it became clear that the sun was never going to break through.

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Then, out of the swirling mist came two shocks of color: the pink hair and neon-green guitar of Rhian Teasdale. The Wet Leg front woman, who once embraced a cottagecore aesthetic and flounced around in prairie dresses and bonnets, now looks more like a weightlifting Amazonian rock god. Dressed in shredded sweats and a cropped tank top, Teasdale flexed her guns in her now-trademark pose, then flashed the crowd a wicked grin as the band launched into “Catch These Fists.” Hester Chambers’ snarling, spiky guitar riff tore across the Polo Fields, immediately igniting a mosh pit below.

The band’s transformation from pastoral oddballs to a muscular rock spectacle is more than cosmetic. Wet Leg’s 2022 debut turned the duo of old Isle of Wight friends Chambers and Teasdale into an apparent overnight sensation. Recorded before they had played a single live show, the eponymous record, spearheaded by viral hit “Chaise Longue,” won them two Brit Awards and two Grammys. Last year’s heavier, hornier second album “Moisturizer” proved they were far more than a novelty, reaching No. 1 in Britain, earning three more Grammy nominations and formally expanding Wet Leg from a duo into a five-piece band.

It also documented a more personal change. According to Teasdale, after always assuming she was straight, she embraced her queerness after meeting her nonbinary partner at a music festival in Portugal in 2021. While making the record, she said that realization allowed her to write sincere love songs for the first time. “Maybe that was something in my subconscious that was just … very gay,” Teasdale said in an interview with the Guardian. “It just feels so much more empowering to write it about a non-man.”

Chambers, meanwhile, is in a long-term relationship with band guitarist Joshua Mobaraki. For “Moisturizer” she also wrote her first love song, “Don’t Speak,” composed from Mobaraki’s perspective and addressed to herself.

At Wet Leg’s earliest shows, there were moments when they still resembled a group of friends watching one another for cues and working out how to be a band in public. On Friday, the fake fog was sometimes so thick that they could barely see across the stage, but they no longer needed to. The five musicians have become a formidable live act, their old brittle guitar sound now floating in layers and shimmers.

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During “Ur Mum,” Teasdale counted to three and invited the Polo Field to produce a primal scream. For the next 10 seconds, thousands of people happily obliged; even one of the security guards stationed at the barricade joined in. Teasdale later poured a bottle of water over herself, and during “Mangetout” writhed along the catwalk as she sang, “You think I’m pretty, you think I’m pretty cool, you want to f—k me, I know most people do.” Behind her, Chambers bent a fuzzy guitar riff that was just as seductive.

But all eyes stayed on Teasdale, as the band have designed it. She has the aloof indie cool of Elastica’s Justine Frischmann with a bit of Madonna’s 1980s command of a stage. Every flex, stare and slow turn toward the crowd appeared carefully judged. It is not hard to imagine a future Teasdale solo record one day.

Part of the reason Wet Leg are so tight and locked in right now is because they have been touring this second album nonstop for over a year. After changing everything so dramatically between its first two albums, the most intriguing question is what Wet Leg will choose to become for album 3.