Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s Self Esteem became a self-fulfilling prophecy. After spending years as a drummer in British indie-pop band Slow Club, she gave herself a new stage name to juice her self-confidence. Her sound got bigger, rowdier, weirder. Her lyrics about being disappointed by useless men often undercut their sting with a gut-punch of pathos. She could get away with more or less interpolating “Black Skinhead” into a spitting diatribe about how women are expected to “always be wet, always be up for it,” or somehow channel the energy of Baz Luhrman’s “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” into “I Do This All the Time,” a strangely beautiful monologue about friends’ babies making her feel insecure. As a pop culture presence, she channels a particularly British form of camp that spans hun culture, chaotic ’90s kids TV star Mr. Blobby, and refashioning Madonna’s cone bra in tribute to the domed shopping center of her Sheffield youth. Despite her keen way with a wink, her live shows were ardently sincere and affecting, with Taylor and her backing choir often moving as a single body: a tender, sisterly spectacle.
Taylor’s riotous second solo album, 2021’s Prioritise Pleasure, was voted the year’s best by many UK outlets and got her upstreamed from an imprint to Polydor. At home she’s not exactly a household name, but she’s competed on Celebrity Bake Off and did a great turn as Sally Bowles in the latest starry revival of Cabaret in the West End. Meanwhile in the U.S., she barely registers even within dedicated music media: When I asked an American critic friend what he thought of “I Do This All the Time,” he replied with just a link to Chris Rock’s “No Sex.” You may now accept our rappers, but our weird broads remain a cultural bridge too far.
But Taylor’s limited third album feels likely to constrain her audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Having made her name on galvanizing a sense of sorority through shared insecurities, she leans into taking-up-space-core and glib sentiment on A Complicated Woman. Opener “I Do and I Don’t Care” shows that she really does do this all the time, repeating her breakout song’s monologuing formula as she crests to the question, “If I’m so empowered/Why am I such a coward?” The album’s musical complications are one-third uplifting MOR, one-third edgier Taylor Swift (“Cheers to Me” is brazenly close to “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”), one-third unconvincing sex-club fare with perversely joyless themes. Lyrically it suffers from a case of the Lizzos, dialing down the personal specificity that made Prioritise Pleasure so startling in favor of broad-brush heteropessimist homilies. “I am not your mother/I am not your mother/I am not your mum,” Taylor seethes on “Mother,” which sanitizes Planningtorock’s sleaze. It’s less camp than the fairly unappealing sound of being told off, reducing men to silly little emotional incompetents who have only ever read The Catcher in the Rye in a way that’s probably quite unhelpful at this point.
It’s one of several songs with a cheaply effective patriarchal bogeyman in its sights: On the budget-Berghain “69,” Taylor lists all the sex positions she’s into but forewarns any prospective lover: “But the one thing I hate/’Cos I just can’t concentrate/No, I just can’t abide/Yeah, I’ve never the time to 69.” Intended as a comment on how women don’t put themselves first in bed, it comes off like a tee-hee watershed comedy sketch about doing it, or an unwanted reminder of Lily Allen’s Sheezus. The dehumanized thrash of “Lies” completes the trifecta, drums roiling like whitewater as she admits how often she hides her true feelings to keep the peace. “I’ll make you fuckin’ hear me,” she rages. But she’s only putting a blunt focus on what, by now, are long-accepted understandings of gender dynamics; it’s a far cry from how much she could contain in a single line like “sexting you at the mental health talk feels counterproductive” on Prioritise Pleasure. Surely we’re too far gone for “women deserve orgasms” to still count as a trenchant political statement.
She contrasts the high dudgeon with pat anthemics. Taylor has cited Elbow’s rapturous “One Day Like This” as an inspiration to write songs that spread their arms wide, primed to soundtrack victorious TV sports montages. Heavy with choir and endless saccharine crescendos, the album ups the stagey energy that worked sparingly on her last record (She also debuted it with a one-off theatrical residency in London, and A Complicated Woman feels like it was produced spectacle-first). “Focus Is Power” grows warm and sentimental as Taylor recalls being told, “‘Don’t be too loud or too quiet’/But I got all this fire.” “Whatever is right for you will guide you through,” she sings on “If Not Now, It’s Soon,” which is pure M People. “Time is a chance to heal” goes “What Now,” as the choir roars and the Etsy checkout goes cha-ching.
Some listeners will feel moved, and may they take everything they can from this. Others may despair at the state of putatively feminist inspo-culture in the age of celebrity all-women space crews reminding girls that they too could one day “put the ass in astronaut.” At the stage show premiering the album, Taylor and her dancers dressed in pilgrim-style outfits that many critics compared to the capes of The Handmaid’s Tale; their movements transform from stiff and “shackled,” Taylor said, “then we exorcise it. Over the course of the show, it all unravels and everyone ends up being themselves instead of conforming to these societal norms.” But “be yourself” culture is, arguably, the defining societal norm of our times, one used to justify a lot of individualism at the expense of actual society. No one album or musician should be burdened with solving systemic injustice, but A Complicated Woman yearns to make A Big Feminist Statement. Down to Moonchild Sanelly giving a very Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie-in-“Flawless” address amid the softly rushing Afrobeats of “In Plain Sight,” it’s one whose myopic focus is stuck in 2013—girls, you got this; men, do better—detached from the fairly pressing feminist concerns of 2025.
Self Esteem broke out as an act of defiant self-definition, but A Complicated Woman’s wide-reaching, mollifying remit feels like Taylor trying to be too much to too many people, to live up to the validation that her last album occasioned. Its best moments are the most personal: singing about her relationship with alcohol on “The Curse,” which builds to a furious, yelled chorus of “I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t fucking work” that rings extremely true; “Logic, Bitch!” is a vulnerable, generous tribute to Taylor’s ex-girlfriend and how they “let the love evolve/Let it change and grow.” These two songs say more about what traps and frees women than any of the boilerplate rhetoric elsewhere. Ironically, so does the way A Complicated Woman tries to make a case for a woman’s multifacetedness but winds up so boxed in by expectation.
