Self Esteem on Ambition, America, and Her “Mad Beast” of a New Album

That confrontational sound took a long time to find. Born and raised in Rotherham, a relatively sleepy Yorkshire mining town, Taylor had her first breakout moment as one half of the folksy indie pop duo Slow Club, whose moderate successes arrived during the heyday of “indie sleaze”—a scene notorious for its boy’s club energy. Taylor has spoken eloquently and often of the misogyny she experienced as an up-and-coming musician in a band, and that she faced again—albeit in a different form—while striking out as a solo act a decade later, in 2019, when releasing her debut album, Compliments Please. “I’m so bruised by my career up until now that I’m still struggling to understand this version of it, where people are actually going to come to see you,” she reflects. “Money is going to be made. You can make art and someone’s going to care about it. That was the dream. I’m living the dream, while also being like, Is this the dream that’s happening right now? Does anyone know?”

Taylor is referring to the head-spinning success that accompanied Prioritise Pleasure, and its lead single, “I Do This All the Time”—an update of Baz Luhrmann’s “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” soaked in the petrol of millennial angst and set alight via an unforgettably rousing chorus. (If it catches you at a fragile moment, expect to weep.) While her career up to that point was hardly a failure, before her second album, Taylor was more likely to be booked for gigs at libraries and early afternoon festival slots—although, even then, her ambition and passion for spectacle as a performer always outstripped her means. “I usually described Self Esteem shows right at the start as like doing the Super Bowl in Camden Barfly,” she says, with a chuckle. “It was me and two girls doing little dance moves in shit bars. I had left the indie world where trying hard was frowned upon, and so I was like, I’m just going to fucking try hard.” With Prioritise Pleasure, she was catapulted to the kinds of stages she’d always dreamed of.

It was everything she’d always wanted, until she realized it wasn’t. In the whirlwind year that followed, packed with promotional appearances, late-night shows, and non-stop performing, she found herself staring down the barrel of total burnout. What saved her, somewhat counterintuitively, was the West End. In 2022, Taylor composed the soundtrack for the award-winning, Jodie Comer-starring production of the Suzie Miller play Prima Facie, while in September 2023, she began a six-month run as Sally Bowles in Cabaret under her government name, opposite Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears. For the first time in her life, Taylor says, she found a semblance of inner peace. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it a lot, because I want many more decades of this career, but it can’t kill me any more,” she says. “How do you achieve that? With Cabaret, it was amazing because I was getting a paycheck, which I realized psychologically felt like safety. I realized part of what had stressed me out all the time, and what I’d always just struggled to describe, was just being freelance.” Also, being able to relinquish creative control was life-changing—though after a few months, the itch to perform her own music again seemed to return. “I really missed it,” she says. “I thought, I really want to do this, but say what I need to say as well.”