Singer-Songwriter Self Esteem Talks the Road to ‘A Complicated Woman’ and Her Daring New Live Show

Dressed to the nines, bottle-blonde hair coiffed, black cab parked across the street. Rebecca Lucy Taylor — a.k.a. Self Esteem — is stepping outside the front door of her London flat, heading to “one of them fancy ‘dos,” when mild calamity strikes. Attached to the collar of her gown is a large, grey, electromagnetic security tag – one that would take a delicate operation to remove. Grey skies and a dash of brolly-ruining wind certainly aren’t helping the situation, either. 

“I just stood there like, ‘F–k this. When will it not be like this?,” she says, recalling the memory. To help illustrate what it felt like in the moment, Taylor talks with her palms pressed against her head. “I have a saying for times like this, like when you get toilet paper on your shoe: ‘That’s very Self Esteem.’

“There’s part of my ego that wants to tell myself all of this is not a f–king joke,” the Rotheram-raised artist continues. ”But then I also can’t help but be present in reality. What would have helped me was if one of the indie girls I used to look up to and be intimidated by had just… farted, or something. That would have been amazing!”

Taylor has learned how to take such indignities with humour and good grace. There was the time, she says, that she walked the BRITs red carpet to a muted response. Or when her sublime second LP Prioritise Pleasure narrowly missed out on the Official U.K. Charts’ top 10 in 2021, landing at No. 11. (“That was the most ‘me’ thing ever.”) Leaving the following year’s Mercury Prize ceremony – which was already hastily rescheduled following the passing of Queen Elizabeth II – empty-handed, meanwhile, was “another ‘no, not quite you’ moment.’” When asked in a subsequent Standard interview about what she collects for a hobby, Taylor playfully responded: “Awards you get for being nominated for something, but not quite winning them.”

There was a time back there, shortly after the pandemic began to wind down, when Taylor was everywhere in the U.K.’s music press. Prioritise Pleasure, with its big, ambitiously constructed choruses that contextualized vivid emotional flashpoints in Taylor’s life, was met with unanimously glowing reviews, leading to its author being subjected immediately to weighty predictions about her future. Along with Taylor’s rich voice, the record shone through its fluorescent electro flourishes and euphoric pop feel. Predecessor Compliments Please (2019) was much more of a cult concern, introducing a promising new star content looming in the wings. 

Taylor has gone from existing as an underground darling to being recognized as a pre-eminent alt-pop star. Though her singles rarely scale the charts, they remain ubiquitous at major festivals (Glastonbury, Green Man, Parklife) and in safe spaces for her devout LGBTQ+ following. There are many jobs, too, that comprise her career – she’s also a West End actress (Cabaret), video director, theatre composer (Prima Facie), panelist, radio host, TV personality – to the point that it feels like she’s hardly disappeared since her last record. This level of graft and visibility has earned her widespread industry recognition and a dazzling public reputation. 

“There’s long been this weird underdog [reputation] that has echoed around me,” she says.

This back-and-forth internal monologue plays out through her forthcoming third LP, A Complicated Woman (due April 25). It contains plenty of epic, thrillingly weird music that only Taylor could create: songs about transcending fear and blowing up your life set against glowing choral melodies (“Focus Is Power”) and thumping club beats (“Mother”).

“Musically, my album sounds mental,” she jokes. “Sometimes, I think, ‘You f–king idiot. You should have just made a shoegaze album that would do well on [radio station BBC] 6Music.”

Across the new record, there’s a sense that Taylor is reckoning with her humor, dreams and anxieties while charting the next stage of her evolution. By the time she returned home after the Prioritise Pleasure tour, she says she found her world had changed, and not in the way you usually associate with an acclaimed album. “Not having a day off in almost two years” had left her feeling burnt out, and she was unable to commit to any hobbies or day-to-day routines.

At the start of creating A Complicated Woman, Taylor felt alienated from her own feelings – a strange paradox, perhaps, for an artist who has never minced her lyrics and one whose powerful live shows, for many, feel like akin to a spiritual reverie. “For me, this has absolutely been the hardest album yet,” she says. “I was saying ‘yes’ to every offer that came my way, so it was written from a place of almost being against my will. It felt like teeth being pulled at times. It was difficult and complicated.”

She picks up and puts down a cup of tea without drinking. “Though it also saw my defiance meet my depleting, ‘I want to give up’-ness, which I think you hear in the record,” she continues. “That’s how the whole [creative] process has been for me: a sense of ‘F–k this’ as well as me saying to myself, ‘Come on, woman!’”

To hear Taylor discuss these contrasting mindsets feels very fitting. Because for A Complicated Woman, she has decided to embrace the mechanisms of the industry around her in a new way entirely. Having released her first two solo records via indie label Partisan [Idles, Laura Marling], she recently signed with Polydor, a move that places her on the brink of the big time – 15 years after she first started putting out music as one half of now-defunct indie duo Slow Club.

We meet in Universal’s north London HQ; after pulling Billboard UK in for a swaying bear-hug, Taylor slouches on a long sofa for our conversation, wearing a soft grey hoodie, trainers and a pinch of makeup. Despite her formidable onstage presence, Taylor radiates self-effacing candour and she is transparent about her business rationale.

“I feel as though I’ve done my end of the deal,” she says of her decision to step up to a major label. “What has been frustrating about the music industry for me is: I’ve done everything to the best of my ability and have worked flat out, and then my life has been spent watching artists supersede me over and over again. You know, I’m older now, so it doesn’t bother me – like, it all comes down to money and the people who can market you. I know now that getting signed doesn’t mean you’re gonna be a huge artist, but anything that helps bolster my work makes me feel hopeful.”

It’s this steadfast approach that has helped Taylor to understand the deeper roots of the unhappiness that cast a shadow over the road to album three. Having weathered a breakup and a more gradual, but eventually near-debilitating depression, she went into writing sessions wanting to rebuild herself after these experiences. Last summer, she enjoyed holidays in Dubrovnik and Crete, occasionally jotting down lyrics while she was away but otherwise remaining off-grid. In the capital, meanwhile, she remains heavily immersed in the arts and the world of drag, both of which have helped shape her musical M.O. 

Later in the year, Taylor had an emotional epiphany while watching the Robbie Williams biopic Better Man. She’s effusive as she explains how its warts-and-all tale – which charts Williams’ working-class childhood in Stoke-on-Trent, through to the fallout of his departure from Take That and resulting substance abuse issues – stirred up feelings in her about her own journey, despite having gone through different hardships.

The film sees Williams, represented via a CGI monkey, start to reconnect with childhood friends after briefly hitting pause on his solo career. Taylor says that she recently made the same move, as part of wanting to envision a more sustainable future for herself in the industry. The resulting insights she’s gleaned about her relationships and mental health are encapsulated within A Complicated Woman’s core objective of accepting how it feels to be a flawed, vulnerable public person. 

“None of this is about me wanting to be a c–-ty little pop star anymore. It’s sort of deeply embarrassing to me to remember the version of myself who wanted to be famous.” Taylor says. “This whole journey has taught me that what’s important is people and community. That’s what the music means to me.”

A Complicated Woman’s conclusion seems to be that hope is still worth fighting for. The melodies are adventurous, and the contradictions of Taylor’s inner psyche loom large, as she confronts both her shadow self and ego. A loud, nail-paint emoji-esque articulation of desire and asserting agency in the bedroom, “69” finds her looser and more liberated than ever. And then there are more poignant tracks like “The Curse,” which navigates despair and exhaustion with an unvarnished frankness.

Recording the latter in the height of 2024’s Brat summer – where Charli XCX’s “365 partygirl” energy felt ubiquitous – caused a minor moral dilemma for Taylor, she laughs: “I felt so embarrassed when I was making my album. I f–king love Brat, but there I was in the studio making my songs like, ‘Get up and try your best! Maybe try and drink less!’”

Taylor is looking forward to seeing her own personal ambitions evolve as her profile continues to rise. Maintaining a private life is at the top of the agenda, and she wants to remain engaged with and curious about what’s around the corner. New opportunities are keeping her “booked and blessed,” while she is working towards buying a flat and has also written a new book.

In the pipeline is Self Esteem Presents: A Complicated Woman, a “quasi-theatrical” performance art show. Directed by the Tony award-winning Tom Scutt, the run (Apr. 15-19) will see Taylor perform tracks from her back catalogue at London’s Duke of York Theatre. She remains tight-lipped about what the set-up will look like, beyond that she sees it as “my version of [David Byrne’s] American Utopia,” and will be backed by an 11-women band.

“I want women to leave these shows and go, ‘I’m not scared about getting older, f–cking bring it on,’” says Taylor. “I want queer people to feel like that too. And I want straight men to feel really worried and scared.” 

Taylor will enter this new era, too, with a stronger self-preservationist streak. Her hope is to keep the goalposts firmly in one place, knowing that she feels at peace with her relative obscurity on the world stage. “Everyone’s telling me, ‘You should go to America,’” she says with a sigh. “Obviously it’d be nice because of the sheer money there is to be made out there, but Slow Club toured America so many times. I can’t go back to playing to like, 50 people!”

Well, remember Better Man? Robbie didn’t ever quite crack the States, Billboard UK posits. “Exactly,” Taylor responds. She smiles. “And that’s okay.”