Self Esteem plays to her strengths on A Complicated Woman

In her pop solo project, Rebecca Lucy Taylor has created a character whose double-edged aphorisms manage to convey painfully relatable experiences in new, insightful ways, like the fourth-wall confessions of Fleabag. (Even a cis man like me feels “seen” by this music, given that it’s so often about women’s experiences vis-à-vis toxic men.) Her third album, A Complicated Woman, marks a four-year break since her last full studio project Prioritise Pleasure, and the shift in emphasis in those titles – from bold imperative to slightly subdued cliché—marks a shift in tone, too.

Where Prioritise Pleasure crammed the good, the bad and the ugly of life as a modern woman into 45 minutes of unpredictable pop, A Complicated Woman is noticeably calmer, more reticent. It’s also less of a burst-at-the-seams affair: “Focus Is Power”, the album’s lead single, sets the scene for much of what’s to follow with its repeated mantras backed by a female choir, strings and piano, a thumping drum beat. It’s fine for what it is, but it’s less interesting than Taylor’s best work, which takes the language of pop and twists it into unsettling reflections on selfhood. Those moments – “Mother”, a blistering takedown of a needy partner who needs to “work on your own shit, yeah, ’cos it’s your shit”, or the deadpan sex rap “69” – add unadulterated techno to Self Esteem’s sonic roster, and they’re easily the most memorable and enjoyable tracks on the album, largely because they’re so at odds with what surrounds them.

That’s not to say the rest of the album falls flat. Taylor is a fantastic vocalist, and A Complicated Woman plays to that strength: her voice is everywhere, sometimes demonstrating its simple resonance and presence as on “Logic, Bitch!”, sometimes snarling and wailing as on “Cheers to Me”, and frequently accompanied by that same female choir. She’s also as witty and astute as ever, particularly on opener “I Do and I Don’t Care”, where every couplet rolls off her tongue like a poignant vignette plucked from the fig tree of a smartphone notes app. “I’m not complaining, I say,” she drawls monotonously: “I’m whingeing in a new way.”

That “new way” doesn’t make itself heard as clearly as it might on A Complicated Woman: the album as a whole is a safer affair than Taylor’s previous releases, but for the most part it’s very good, and its cohesion isn’t necessarily a weakness. Still, it’s hard not to approach a new Self Esteem album expecting some kind of life-changing revelation, six months of therapy condensed into an hour-long speedrun. There’s flashes of that – “If I’m sober, I’m drunk: it’s still me in the middle of the problem” is a lyric I’ll likely be parroting to my therapist later this week and claiming as my own – but there are also too many moments of unearned grandeur, too many attempts to batter a tattooable refrain out of a slightly reworded cliché. It’s an unexpected pleasure when the rousing chorus of closing track “The Deep Blue Okay” swallows itself into a timewarped lounge-jazz outro: it’s the kind of sonic weirdness that’s curiously lacking from much of what comes before it, despite the fact that – like so much else – it’s something Taylor does so well.