Self Esteem - A Complicated Woman 

On third record ‘A Complicated Woman’, Rebecca Lucy Taylor - aka Self Esteem - scraps much of the industrial alt-pop that coloured acclaimed second album ‘Prioritise Pleasure’, instead honing in on the soulful theatre at the heart of her manifesto. The feel good pop’s still around, of course - see her standout middle-finger to fuckboys ‘Cheers To Me’ - but most present here is her core; a portrait of the modern woman both in motion and standing still. Backed by a jubilant choir, Taylor’s rapturous explorations of womanhood are torn through the mundanity of growing older, the depressive nature of Groundhog Day-normality and the catharsis of splitting even further as age makes concrete her contradictions. Across this - her most concentrated and burning record - Taylor’s hardened Sheffield-isms float through the tearjerker soul of a thousand women; a knotted person resisting an urge to untangle themselves because complexity brings connection.

And that’s largely what ‘A Complicated Woman’ comprises: it’s the deep chat at an afters that reminds the group of the universal human experience and all its listlessness - and the fuckery of men in love in between (‘Mother’). This is not for the purpose of melancholy, mind, but guttural motivation (‘Focus is Power’). There’s alchemy in her craft: ‘A Complicated Woman’ pulls the listener out of their core to breathe lighter; every track conjures some universal experience that’s unavoidably about those listening as much as it is about Taylor. “I know way too much to ever fall in love,” she sings on cinematic, transcendental closer ‘The Deep Blue Okay’, “so I’ll roll on unmerrily.” Yet, the uncompromising Self Esteem movement is best summarised at the record’s start, via the spoken word affirmation ‘I Do And I Don’t Care’, a reminder that everything’s actually alright when you’re together: “We’re not chasing happiness anymore, girls, we’re chasing nothing / The great big still / The deep blue okay / And we’re okay today.”