The first thing your eye does is recoil, just slightly. On a nondescript beige carpet, in a room washed in cool grey-green light, a red-haired woman is crouched on all fours like something that shouldn't be allowed indoors. Her fingers end in long, sharpened, dirt-touched nails that press into the pile. Her mouth is stretched into a grin too wide, too fixed, a rictus that reads as wrong before you can say why. This is Rhian Teasdale, and this is the cover of Wet Leg's moisturizer.
Look at what she's wearing and the joke starts to land. Knee-high white socks climb her shins, printed with a red heart and the words 'I ♥ ME', a squiggle of black running up the side. She loves herself. She loves herself so much she has become a goblin about it. The grin was digitally manipulated to push it past human, and it works: she is perched like a gargoyle, creaturely and borderline demonic, staring straight down the lens with an unhinged delight.
Behind her, half-turned away, sits bandmate Hester Chambers, in a plain white top and pale blue jeans, long fair hair spilling down her back. Her arms wrap around a head, and it takes a beat to register that the head is her own. She appears to be making out with herself. Two women, two versions of the same idea: self-love curdled into all-consuming infatuation, tender and grotesque in the same frame.
That theme is the whole point. moisturizer, released on 11 July 2025 through Domino Recording Company, deals in the grotesquerie of wanting, of being obsessed with someone, possibly yourself. The image is a tongue-in-cheek encapsulation of it: love as something that makes you hunch, sprout talons and dig into the carpet.
The path to it was almost accidental. Teasdale had been scrolling Instagram when she came across the work of photographer Iris Luz, and reached out to work with her. At that point there was no grand plan for a cover, just an idea to shoot press photos. Their friend Joanna Guise, who commissioned the shoot for both promo pictures and the eventual sleeve, suggested something looser: the band, Guise and Luz should all go away for a weekend out of London and simply experiment. It was over that weekend, away from the machinery of a normal photo session, that the cover was conceptualized.
You can feel that experimental origin in the picture. Nothing about it looks like a label brief. The setting is banal to the point of comedy, a corner of carpet, a skirting board, a sheer curtain glowing against the wall, the kind of anonymous room where nothing strange should happen. Against that flatness the two figures become genuinely unsettling, because the horror is domestic. There is no set dressing to blame it on.
There's an intention buried in the obscured faces, too. Teasdale spoke about the band taking a step back from being perceived and photographed, and that reluctance feeds the imagery: one face distorted past recognition, the other turned entirely away. It's a portrait of two people refusing to give you a normal portrait. Transforming into these bolder, stranger creatures reads as a kind of armour.
Reviewers reached straight for the word 'demonic', noting the scary talons and the unhinged look on Teasdale's face, and took the whole thing as a signal of the group's transformed, more aggressive identity. Wet Leg, catalogued as British post-punk revival, had traded any expectation of tidy indie charm for something that dares you to keep looking. The design and packaging were handled by a team including Matt de Jong, Jamie-James Medina and Undercard, with the band themselves credited, and Jade Rache working as production designer. The cover photograph itself is Iris Luz's.
The gamble paid off in an unusual way. When the 68th Annual Grammy Awards introduced a brand-new Best Album Cover category, created to celebrate art directors and their contribution to a record, moisturizer landed among its inaugural nominees. A picture of a woman grinning like a goblin on a carpet became one of the first images ever considered for the honour, which is its own kind of vindication for a concept dreamed up on a weekend away.
Collectors got a second version of the story. A limited alternate 'family portrait' cover was pressed on clear vinyl and sold exclusively at participating record stores during a midnight launch, the Wet Leg Listening Party, on 10 July 2025, with roughly 2,000 copies spread across North and South America. But the main image is the one that sticks: the beige carpet, the 'I ♥ ME' socks, the talons in the pile, and that manufactured grin stretched a fraction too far, a self-love story told as a horror movie you can't quite look away from.
