Wet Leg Got a Grammy Nomination for Their Album Cover
Among the three nominations Moisturizer collected at the 68th Grammy Awards, one was for the sleeve. Best Album Cover is a new category, and Wet Leg are among its first nominees, which means the artwork was assessed as a work in its own right rather than as packaging around the songs.
For a band whose entire public presentation has been of a piece since the beginning, that is the most fitting recognition available. The other two nominations, Best Alternative Music Album and Best Alternative Music Performance for Mangetout, are the conventional ones. The cover nomination is the one that describes what Wet Leg actually do.
Five Writers Instead of One
The structural change behind the record is in the credits. Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers founded the band on the Isle of Wight, and the debut was largely Teasdale’s writing. On Moisturizer all five members share credits for the first time: the two founders plus Ellis Durand on bass, Henry Holmes on drums and Joshua Mobaraki on guitar and synth.
They wrote it together in Southwold in March 2024, living communally for the duration, and the test they applied was consistently practical. Chambers described the approach plainly: “We were just kind of having fun and exploring. We focussed on: Is this going to be fun to play live?” That is a filter about performance rather than about songwriting, and it accounts for how the record behaves.
Writing communally also changes what a band can be, in a way that goes beyond credits. A record assembled by one writer and then arranged by everyone else has a fixed centre; a record written in a room by five people has to survive several opinions before it reaches a studio. The risk is blandness by committee. The evidence against that here is how strange the results are, because Southwold clearly produced arguments rather than compromises.
Built From Touring
The debut turned Wet Leg into a live act by accident. It went to number one at home and abroad, won three Grammys and two Brits, passed half a billion streams, and committed them to years of touring they had not planned for. Moisturizer is the sound of that experience being fed back into the writing.
Dan Carey produced it at Salvation Studios in Brighton in autumn 2024, with Alan Moulder mixing. Twelve tracks run thirty-eight minutes, so nothing outstays its welcome: only U and Me at Home passes four minutes, and Liquidize and Jennifer’s Body both come in under two and a half. That compression is a touring band’s instinct, where a song that sags is immediately obvious from the stage.
The Singles Ran Ahead of It
Catch These Fists arrived on 1 April 2025, a dance-punk track built on an electrified groove, howling synth and a deliberately flat vocal delivery. CPR followed on 27 May, then Davina McCall on 23 June, and Mangetout on release day itself.
Naming a song after a British television presenter is exactly the kind of decision that makes this band difficult to categorise, and it is not a joke at her expense. The titles across the record work the same way, running from Pokemon to Pillow Talk to 11:21, refusing the seriousness that a second album from a Grammy-winning act is supposed to display.
That refusal is a real strategic choice rather than a personality trait. The conventional route after a debut of this size is to signal growth: longer songs, a bigger studio, a more sombre palette, an interview about the pressure. Wet Leg did the opposite on every count, and the album’s lower-case title is the smallest and clearest signal of it. A record called moisturizer is telling you in advance not to expect a statement.
Love Songs, Reluctantly
Teasdale had previously been open about disliking love songs, and the album is full of them. Domino’s own description ran through the range: stressed-out, gooey-eyed, gratuitously horny, blissed out, obsessive and mysterious. Set against those are the confrontational tracks, Catch These Fists and Mangetout, which are about encounters rather than relationships.
Having the two modes on one record is what stops it reading as a straightforward turn toward sincerity. The band did not swap irony for feeling; they put both on the same album and left the listener to work out which is operating at any moment.
What the Critics Said
Metacritic settled at 84, which is genuine acclaim rather than politeness. Pitchfork gave it 7.8 and called it a near-reinvention. The Guardian went four out of five and found the songs supremely punchy. Rolling Stone matched that score and described it as keeping everything fast and frisky. NME also gave four.
The consistency of that response is unusual for a second album following a debut this successful, because the standard critical move is to find the follow-up either too safe or too different. Reviewers largely agreed it was neither, which is a harder outcome to engineer than it sounds.
It is worth noting what the reviews did not say. Nobody described it as a maturing, and nobody reached for the language of a band finding its serious voice, which is the default frame applied to a successful second record. The critical consensus instead treated the humour and the noise as the substance rather than as a phase to be grown out of, and that is a meaningful shift in how this kind of band gets written about.
Number One at Home
It entered at number one on the UK Albums Chart and the UK Independent Albums chart on 26,014 first-week units, and reached 45 on the Billboard 200. Those figures describe a band with a deep domestic base and a real but smaller American audience, which is the ordinary shape for a British guitar act. Holding the independent chart top spot alongside the main one also matters commercially, because Domino is an independent and those units are counted against a very different cost base.
The touring reflected the same asymmetry. The UK run in May took in Birmingham, Brixton, Edinburgh, Leeds and Manchester, followed by a European festival summer that included Primavera Sound, Glastonbury, Roskilde, Rock Werchter, TRNSMT, Way Out West and Green Man. North America came later in the year across eighteen dates from Seattle to Los Angeles.
Why the Cover Category Matters
The Recording Academy creating a Best Album Cover award is a response to a real shift. Artwork spent two decades shrinking to a thumbnail beside a play button, and has recently become one of the few remaining places where a record can present itself as an object. Vinyl sales and the visual demands of short-form video have both pushed in the same direction.
Wet Leg have always treated presentation as part of the work rather than as decoration, which is a habit that survives the transition from a debut written mostly by one person to a record written by five. That whole problem of what a band does with itself between albums is one we have looked at before. Their answer was to tour until the band became a writing unit, then make a record designed to be played by it. The sleeve nomination suggests the Academy noticed the presentation was doing work too.
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