Unbothered, Unapologetic, Unskippable: Self Esteem’s ‘A Complicated Women’
Twelve tracks of healing, satire, and feminist fury that say what your group chat’s been too tired to type.
Photo: Press
If you’ve ever tried to “work on yourself” while carrying the weight of patriarchy, an unpaid therapy bill, and the emotional hangover of a situationship that definitely wasn’t just casual — congratulations! You’re exactly who Self Esteem is singing to (and possibly about).
Since her 2019 debut Compliments Please, Rebecca Lucy Taylor has been slowly, ferociously redefining what pop can be: messy, majestic, feminist, and defiantly full volume. Then came 2021’s Prioritise Pleasure. A Mercury Prize nominated knockout that turned vulnerability into theatre and burnout into a danceable reckoning. It didn’t just resonate — it became a blueprint for femme rage, queer joy, and holding your own hand through the chaos.
And now? Self Esteem returns with her most defiant, theatrical, and emotionally feral work to date.
A Complicated Woman isn’t just an album — it’s a mission statement. A love letter to complexity. A glittery middle finger to anyone who’s ever suggested you might be “a bit much”. Opening with “I’m not complaining / I’m whinging in a new way”, across twelve tracks Taylor makes confessions and confrontations — with the industry, with lovers, with herself, with everyone who ever told her to tone it down, smile more, or “just be chill.” Each track is a finely tuned dose of experimental pop chaos: big builds, layered harmonies, percussion that sounds like someone slamming a door mid argument, and lyrics that feel like they were written in the Notes app at 3AM, then performed in front of your ex and their therapist. Taylor’s music isn’t just catchy; it’s confrontational. “Are you interested in growing? / I recommend listening”. It doesn’t ask for attention — it commands it.
Self Esteem continues her career-long tradition of weaponising music as therapy, satire, and exorcism — often all at once. Notable numbers being Logic, Bitch!, Cheers To Me and In Plain Sight. Lyrically, it’s a pep talk… but make it existential. Lyrics hit that magic place where poetry meets post-therapy breakthrough; blunt but surgical. Lines like “I don’t need perfection, I just need reflection” and “If not now, it’s soon!” is a mantra for the chronically overwhelmed: a refusal to give up, even when the universe keeps ghosting your manifestations. Self Esteem is doing what she does best: taking the mess of modern womanhood — capturing the self-doubt, the resilience, the pressure to constantly rise and rebrand, be better, do more, heal faster — and spinning it into something defiant, dazzling, and just self-aware enough to sting.
The album cover sees Taylor in a white bonnet, visually invoking The Handmaid’s Tale and the iconography of puritanical womanhood. But this isn’t cosplay — it’s confrontation. By wrapping herself in the uniform of silent submission, she flips the symbolism on its head. It’s a challenge to the entire cultural machinery that still expects women — artists, performers, people — to be agreeable, digestible, and non threatening. The imagery, much like the music, refuses to whisper. It’s pageantry used as protest. Performance art with a pulse.
There’s a quiet rebellion in how unbothered this album is by male approval. Tracks like Mother and 69 dare you to expect something raunchy, then delivers something radically honest instead. “Choking is superfluous. Consent serves the both of us.” It’s the aural equivalent of making eye contact during the awkward part of a hookup and asking, “Are you even enjoying this?”. The male gaze can’t survive that level of scrutiny — and neither can half the men this album will make deeply uncomfortable.
Production-wise, A Complicated Women is pure Self Esteem: maximalist but intentional, dramatic but never indulgent. Tracks like Lies, What Now and The Deep Blue Ok build like a TED Talk being hijacked by a choir of your inner voices; some whispering affirmations, others shouting to be let out of the cage. “Now I see it clear. With every passing of each year. I deserve to be here.” There’s a clattering urgency in the percussion, a kind of marching-band-meets-pop-theatre vibe that manages to be both grounded and gloriously unhinged. Synths swell like pride and crash like burnout. It’s empowerment in Dolby Surround.
But what sets this apart isn’t just the sound, it’s the specificity. This isn’t generic self help pop. This is the female condition under a disco ball: the exhaustion of performing, the fury of being overlooked, the joy of finally hearing your own voice above the noise. “We’re not chasing happiness anymore girls, we’re chasing nothing / The great big still / The deep blue okay / And we’re okay today.”
A Complicated Women taps into that lived experience of constantly multitasking your own healing while still smiling politely in meetings. It’s a very specific type of millennial/femme catharsis — one that knows growth isn’t linear, and sometimes the best you can do is just not ghost yourself today.
Self Esteem isn’t making music to be liked. She’s making it to be heard. Loudly, and by the people who need it most. Her songs are sermons for the emotionally overdrawn, the spiritually scorched, and anyone who’s ever apologised for taking up space. In a music world saturated with platitudes and performative empowerment, Self Esteem offers something better: the messy, glorious truth.
In short: Self Esteem continues to be the unfiltered group chat of experimental pop music. “A Complicated Women” isn’t here to make you feel good in a soft-focus, Pinterest-quote kind of way. It’s here to remind you that you already are good — messy, contradictory, brilliant — and anyone who can’t handle that can kindly exit stage left.
A Complicated Women is out now via Polydor Records.