Three years ago, Rebecca Lucy Taylor, also known as the pop star Self Esteem, released her second album, Prioritise Pleasure. It delivered her dreams on a glittering platter. It topped end-of-year lists, was named the Guardian’s album of the year, got nominated for a Brit award and the Mercury music prize, put her on high-profile radio playlists, sent her to the West End, where she starred in Cabaret, and secured her appearances on TV shows that she’d always dreamed of doing. At the end of it all, she headlined a stadium, in her home town of Sheffield. And then?
“I got so fucking pissed off and miserable and depressed and crazy.”
We’ve been sitting in a London pub for just over two minutes. We’re getting straight into it.
“I know! I’ve had one sip of wine and I’m away,” she laughs.
It is late on a wintry weekday afternoon and the sun is setting. It’s quiet, save for a smattering of young friends day-drinking, and the odd regular, supping alone. Taylor asks for a Guinness, but the great British Guinness shortage is ongoing and the pub is all out, so she settles for a dry white wine, with ice.
We clink glasses. What do you mean by crazy?
“Oh, well, I still don’t really know. And it’s not like I shot to global fame. It’s not like a Chappell Roan moment. I just did well for the first time in my 15-year career. People were listening.”
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 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.”
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.
“Of course I was never gonna fucking do that,” she says. But the point was, she wanted to. “I was believing my own bullshit. I was like: ‘Come on, we can do this, let’s go!’ and I was body-positive, and all the press and the focus and the visibility just made me want to be quieter and smaller and assimilate.” She felt as if she was suddenly expected to be one thing, and worried that if she wasn’t, she’d upset people. “If I got married to a man and had a baby, it feels like people would be angry with me,” she explains. She came out as bisexual in 2013, and was in a relationship with a woman for years. “There’s a song about her on every album.” The latest is Logic, Bitch, about the evolution of their relationship, from romance to friendship. “She’s just as important as my boyfriend is to me. But they’re different types of love,” she says. She has been with her boyfriend for about a year. How did you meet? “Cabaret! Hahaha. I’m so basic. But yeah, we’ll see, we’ll see. Surprised it’s a man, but it’s really nice.” Why surprised? “I just didn’t think I’d do that again, but here we are.” She told him that she’d written a romantic lyric for him on the new album. “He’s like: ‘Wow, thanks.’ The lyric is: ‘I know way too much to be in love, but the idea’s good, I see where you’re coming from.’” She laughs. “I’m like, that’s as good as you’ll get.”
A couple sit down at the table next to us and start snogging, loudly. Taylor catches my eye, smirks, and carries on. She has sung and spoken about questioning monogamy, or feeling ambiguous about having kids, for most of her career. “But I might, or I might not. And what this album is saying is that nothing is set in stone. The fact that I love EastEnders is, but apart from that.” The new songs have set off a metaphorical pendulum. “But it’s complicated, and it’s ongoing, and this album feels like I’m going, fuck this, I can’t be arsed, can’t do it.” She swings back. “And then, come on, let’s keep going.”
Since Self Esteem started, Taylor has talked about sexism and misogyny in the music industry, from pointing out how backstage dressing rooms aren’t designed for women (some only have urinals, is one example) to wearing a T-shirt on stage printed with the often-asked question: “What’s it like being a woman in music?” Was it industry pressure that made her feel as if she needed to change her appearance? “No one said this, but I assumed that I needed to be hotter, and younger, and do a bunch of singles that do well on Spotify.” Then where did it come from? Is it just the so-called standard path it should take, that it has to get bigger and bigger? “I am somebody who would win The Apprentice,” she says, matter-of-factly. I do not doubt her. “I’m like, what is it you need, and I’ll fucking figure it out.” What she needed for herself, she recognised, was safety, and as a working-class woman, she realised that safety comes from having money. “Because I never had any. So you go, right, how do I earn enough of that? Get as big as possible.”
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.”
I wonder if being in the public eye exacerbates that. “It did, I think. I went quietly mad. I just went numb. I still don’t feel like anything is different, but then I’ll do something – I hate ‘celebrity’, but I’m on Celebrity House of Games,” she says. She was a contestant on the Richard Osman-hosted quizshow’s Christmas specials. On her new album, she has a song called 69, a pounding club banger that lists all the sex positions she does and does not like, which probably makes her the only contestant on there with a song about pegging. She guffaws. “And that’s why I say yes to this shit. High brow, low brow. We get it all in. The dream was always to bring art, and to inject it into places it isn’t.” She has said before that she wanted to write her own version of Christina Aguilera’s Dirrty. Is that what 69 is? “I say what I mean in a song, instead of replying to people’s text messages. So it was just another announcement, a PSA, to anyone who might, er, have sex with me.”
* * *
Taylor was brought up in a village between Rotherham and Sheffield. Her parents still live in the same house and she has just come back to London after spending Christmas there. “I had a big, important meeting in my childhood bedroom three days ago,” she says. When she left school, she wanted to study drama, but was rejected from all the places she applied to. She thought she’d take a year off to get better at acting, and apply again, but in 2006 she and Charles Watson formed an indie band, Slow Club, which changed the course of her life. Taylor played drums and guitar, and sang. The band split up in 2017, after 11 years together.
Though Slow Club were never “indie sleaze”, the term given to the era by younger people rediscovering neon vests and flicky eyeliner on TikTok, they were around towards the end of that time, and roughly adjacent to bands such as the Libertines, Klaxons and the Wombats. From what I recall, it was a pretty blokey world. “A lot of what I’m thinking now is, I was born, and then I was a child, and then I was in Slow Club. And everyone around me was a man, and my currency was what I looked like. But it was just a given. I never thought it wasn’t fair. And all of Self Esteem’s music is me going, hang on, that wasn’t fucking fair.” She hated touring. “A lot of the time in Slow Club, I felt like a burden, ruining these lads’ fun by not wanting to tour. I was so scared of these long American tours. But we were sleeping on floors! No wonder you were terrified, babe.” Self Esteem’s big showy pop image was a direct response to that. “To leave Slow Club and make music on my own, I went out to be the biggest artist in the world. I was like, Stefani Germanotta [Lady Gaga], here we fucking go. It needed that energy to get out of indie land.”
In a roundabout way, indie land has been on her mind again lately. For the teenager who was knocked back from drama school, it all came home to roost in late 2023, when she played Sally Bowles in an acclaimed revival of Cabaret in the West End. “I always fancied myself as an actress, and I auditioned for bits,” she says. “I auditioned for Ted Lasso, which I got very excited about. Didn’t get it.” Which part? “Some lesbian who runs a business? And I had a Danny Boyle meeting, and every time, I was like, here we go. I fancied it loads.” She saw the Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley Cabaret, in 2021. “I was like, fucking hell, this is perfect. Everything about it. Sally Bowles is me. Went home and sang Maybe This Time, with karaoke on the laptop in the toilet, my then-lover with fingers in their ears.” Later, she got a call, asking if she’d be interested in auditioning. She did, twice. “I worked so hard, really tried hard, really fucking cared about it, but also really felt it. It was amazing,” she says.
One of the influences on her Sally Bowles was Network, the 1976 film and more recently a play, about a news anchor who cracks, with the famous line, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.” She channelled that on stage. “The journey she goes on is coming from a place of, you can’t keep acting any more, you can’t keep up the performance, you’ve just fucking had it.” Her new album, similarly, has an angry-men theme. It was sent to me with a reference sheet, featuring pictures of Network, Gordon Ramsay shouting, and Russell Crowe in Gladiator: are you not entertained? “This album is about a woman screaming, and I’m fed the fuck up, and I’ve given up, in loads of ways. But then, I’m defiant again,” she says. She is screaming, herself, on the cover.
She tells me a story about an epiphany she had at a gig in Sheffield, about 10 years ago. “My ex-girlfriend’s twin sister used to go out with the bassist from the Enemy,” she says, so she went to see them. The 00s rock band were viewed, by some, as being a bit landfill indie. “And I was a snobby 6 Music bitch, going: ‘This isn’t my scene.’ And I loved it. I was watching this crowd of men, and they were all men, singing every word, kissing each other, hugging each other.” She found it inspiring. “I wanted to make stadium football chant expression, for people who aren’t men, or that type of man. There’s something beautiful about watching a lad who probably didn’t get to sing his heart out without the piss being taken out of him, being able to sing his heart out now. Lad music made sense to me. Men with guitars made sense to me. Finally, after all these years!”
She loves Arctic Monkeys. She loves Oasis. “Honestly, all I listen to at the moment is the Divine Comedy.” She starts to sing the Elbow song, One Day Like This. “‘Throw those curtains wiiide …’ So much!” And, she says, there are “more artistic” things to say about masculinity, and how that comes out on the album, though at this stage she is less certain about what she wants to say about it. She seems to be thinking it through as she talks. “I love wearing a suit, I love wearing a football shirt. I don’t have a clever enough sentence for it yet. But it’s something about the neutralising of my femininity that I feel fucking good doing, but it’s not as far as I feel non-binary. I don’t know.”
I might be reaching here, but are we in the same realm as drag? Taylor says she only listens to podcasts about Drag Race, and lurks in subreddits about the show, which she finds calming. No, she says. “I don’t feel male. It’s not an attempt to be that. I was a tomboy, and it was this horrible shock when I got boobs at 13. The world went from being this fun thing to being terrifying. All the music is coming from that place, really.” When she was at school, she and her friends auditioned for an am-dram production of Oliver!. “All my friends got in to Fagin’s gang, but they put me as a serving wench, because they said I looked too womanly.” She was 13. “So I think the reason I’m drawn to male-presenting clothing is that somewhere, I’ve never felt comfortable …” She tails off. “But then it’s also the reason I go: this is my body, fuck you. It comes in and out, comes in waves.” You’re a complicated woman. “Never told you I was anything else,” she shrugs.
She has been slowly realising that who she really wants to be is Damon Albarn. “But then, over the years, you sort of realise there’s a fucking fundamental difference, in that, I’m a woman.” She loved the Blur documentary To the End, which came out last year. “They look so cool. They’re still so respected. They’re all just getting fucked up in the studio, and everyone’s going, weyyyyy. Imagine if that was women in their 50s doing that?” It’s not impossible, she concedes. “But for my internalised misogyny … I logically know that being 38 is fucking fine, but then the Heat-magazine-reading person that grew up with all that shit goes: ‘Ooh, what does she look like?’ I do that to myself.”
She barely follows any musicians on Instagram because she ends up comparing herself with them. When Charli xcx’s all-conquering Brat summer kicked off, Taylor started to panic. A Complicated Woman closes with a song called The Deep Blue Okay, which is about, well, deciding to be OK. In many ways, its subject matter is the antithesis of Brat’s unapologetically messy party girl. “I was so stressed out. I adore it and everything about it and everything about her, but I was making music going: [she sings] ‘Maybe drink less? Maybe be OK?’ I was in the studio writing and recording my feelgood fucking hug songs.” She started to feel embarrassed. “But then I realised, every Brat will be 38 one day,” she smiles. “That was a horrible, hairy few weeks where I was like, what am I fucking doing? No one wants this. It’s self-doubt, and all the rest of it, in spades.”
Does she think she’ll ever get on top of the self-doubt? When they first started talking, her therapist told her that she needed to love herself. “I thought, well, how do you do that, idiot?” But around Prioritise Pleasure, she had moments of realising it might be possible. “Something really clicked: I really do love myself, I’m fab, I don’t doubt that.” She is doubting herself at the moment, but she also knows that it is possible to stop feeling that way. “I’m better than I was, and I’ve just got to keep going.”
Criticism still floors her, she admits. “The second I get a review of the album that calls me clever, I’ll feel better. But my mate has just made a film, and I’m simultaneously going: ‘We have to unlearn our need for reviews.’” We finish our drinks. The snogging couple has gone, leaving only a glove behind. It’s dark outside. “But, tough shit,” she continues. “I whinge and I whinge and I whinge, but being able to do it is fucking brilliant.”
• A Complicated Woman by Self Esteem is due out in April.
