FEATURE:
The Digital Mixtape
of her anticipated third studio album, I wanted to put together a Self Esteem mixtape. The moniker of Rebecca Lucy Taylor, A Complicated Woman arrives on 25th April. There is a pre-sale that I would advise people to check out. Self Esteem has a run at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London from 16th-19th April. On Wednesday at 10 a.m., you can get the chance to be a part of a phenomenal experience. Released in October 2021, Prioritise Pleasure was the second album from Self Esteem. Hugely acclaimed and nominated for the Mercury Prize, I think A Complicated Woman will be among the most acclaimed albums of this year. I want to quote from a recent interview with Self Esteem from The Guardian:
“That is no surprise. Like Taylor, the album was funny, frank and highly literate, in both art and pop. Its choreographed live performances nodded to Blond Ambition-era Madonna, while its diary-esque spoken-word lead single I Do This All the Time combined aphorisms about life as a British millennial woman with things that men have said to and about Taylor. “All you need to do, darling, is fit in that little dress of yours / If you weren’t doing this you’d be working in McDonald’s,” runs one vivid couplet. A fan got the line “You’re a good, sturdy girl” tattooed on their arm. Its overall mood was one of defiance, and shortly after its release, in April 2021, it became established as a modern classic. As a result of that song, she says, “everything I ever wanted was offered to me”.
I just worked nonstop; didn’t listen to anyone telling me to have a day off. But obviously, I was burned out
I tell her I feel as if I’m reading her diary when listening to her music, but is that fair? “Ummm,” she replies, then answers firmly. “Yeah. It is.” Her first album, 2019’s Compliments, Please, was the truth, “but I did dress it up in different narratives in order to say it, because I was too scared. Prioritise Pleasure was the first time I didn’t do that. Honestly, I can’t say boo to a goose, but I will say it in a song, and I’ll keep it vague enough so no one can send me a nasty text message. I want them to have that step and go: ‘Oh, is it art?’ But it’s not. It’s me.”
The success of Prioritise Pleasure panicked Taylor into saying yes to everything she was asked to do. “So I just worked nonstop; didn’t listen to anyone telling me to have a day off. And I hate, like, ‘burnout’,” she says, cringing. “But obviously, I was burned out. I really was. I felt nothing. It was horrible.” She had been diagnosed with depression in 2013, and started therapy and medication then, but at the end of Prioritise Pleasure, she went to see a psychiatrist again. “I didn’t feel all right, and I still don’t know what I feel like, really. I’m really low, a lot.” A chronic overthinker, she has been trying to work out why, now she has achieved everything she wanted to achieve, she’s still struggling. “Is that a natural human reaction? Like, be careful what you wish for? Everyone being like, ‘Well, what are you whingeing about, you’ve got everything you’ve banged on about wanting, your whole life?’ But I couldn’t explain it. I just felt nothing. And I flatlined. With the internet, you can diagnose yourself with anything. And now it’s like, burnout, or, you know, dopamine addiction. I probably have all these things, but it doesn’t really help me,” she says. “What do I do now, then?”
The answer is A Complicated Woman, the third Self Esteem album, due at the end of April. It is her best yet. The pop bombast and sloganeering of its predecessors has evolved into a more complex, but no less immediate, beast. It ranges from more spoken word (I Do and I Don’t Care, a natural successor to I Do This All the Time) to anthems about getting your shit together (Focus Is Powerful) and working out how she feels about drinking (The Curse, which builds to a rousing choral climax of: “I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t fucking work”, and sounds like an X Factor winner’s Christmas single from an alternate universe).
She says the album was written “through gritted teeth”, and that in an ideal world, she’d have had two years to think about it. Why not wait? “For money, and time, and the big thing that I’m, sort of, not 25.” She is 38 now, and both strident and self-conscious about it. Not for the first time today, it’s obvious why she has given the album that title. “Also, no one actually said this to me, but I was like, I need a nose job, and I need to do bleepy-bloopy pop girlie. I thought, the only way to capitalise on this is to come back as a hot girlie pop star.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Rosaline Shahnavaz/The Guardian
Taylor doesn’t need me to point out the irony. The project is called Self Esteem. Prioritise Pleasure’s most streamed song, Fucking Wizardry, calls an ex lucky to have got anywhere near her in the first place. She performed it with an expert dance routine on the Graham Norton Show and then explained to Kate Hudson what a Boots Advantage card is. She talked to magazines and podcasts about accepting and celebrating her body, recreating the 1999 Rolling Stone cover of Britney Spears for the NME. Her lyrics have always been more nuanced, but her image was that of an empowered woman, riding high on a wave of self-acceptance. That heightened version of Self Esteem was part Esther Perel, part Barbara Kruger collage, part barmaid at the Rovers Return. You wouldn’t necessarily expect her to have come away from the biggest success of her career deciding to get a nose job and soften her edges.
She is in the middle of buying her first home, a two-bedroom flat. “I’m freezing my eggs, buying a flat, finishing the album. These three things have been what I’ve been doing for the whole of 2024 and none of them are done yet,” she laughs. “So I’ve been going a bit mad. As a very impatient person, it’s been hard.” The flat, she says, is a dream come true. “But the price – it’s insane. I will have to live like I’m living in my 20s. But I’ll have four walls that no one can kick me out of, at least. I’m fucking excited about the idea I might have a kitchen island. That’s more interesting to me than having sex with three different people this week.”
Is she contrary? “Yeah! ’Course! Isn’t everyone, though? I hope you can hear that on the record. The point of the record is to go: it’s never fucking over. It’s not as simple as, ‘boss bitch, here we go!’ It just isn’t. You might exercise for six months every day, and then you might just fucking not for a bit. I still go, oh, there’s this person I should be, and I’m not, and hate myself for that”.
There will be a lot more coming from Self Esteem very shortly. New music and tastes of A Complicated Woman. It will be interesting reading new interviews and hearing what Rebecca Lucy Taylor says about her new material. One of the most loved and respected artists in this country, below is a selection of her brilliance. An artist about to unveil her next chapter, it is going to be fascinating seeing…
WHAT comes next for her.