Praise from Madonna has not set in yet

Rebecca Lucy Taylor, aka Self Esteem, chats to CASEY COOPER-FISKE about the music heroes who have inspired her amid her rise to fame

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PERFORMING under the name Self Esteem, Rebecca Lucy Taylor has taken the long route to critical success, admitting that “no one was really that interested” in her early work with indie duo Slow Club from 2006 to 2017.

But now the 38-year-old is one of the most exciting artists in pop following the release of her second album Prioritise Pleasure in 2021, which was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2022.

Rebecca, whose first release as Self Esteem was 2019’s Compliments Please, reveals she was “very stressed out” with the thought of following up the critically acclaimed record with A Complicated Woman, which was released this April.

She explains: “My whole career no one was really that interested in what I was doing, and then suddenly Prioritise Pleasure got these glowing reviews and it was just nothing but positive press.

“And it felt like, what's the catch? And the catch was, artistically, it’s very hard to come back from that.

“I wanted to make an album that wasn’t going to just play into what a pop music system would want next, which to make things go bigger, you sort of dilute it down. And the version of that for me would be, here come the girls getting ready... you don’t need a boyfriend music. But there’s so much more than that going on for me.