Self Esteem - Prioritise Pleasure

"All the fucked up shit I did thinking it would make me happy ... very little of it did really."

Album: Prioritise Pleasure [2nd album]
Genre: Pop, Art Pop
Recorded:
Album Release: October 22nd 2021
Single Release: July 7th 2021 [2nd single]
Length: 4:05
Producer: Johan Hugo Karlberg
Vocalist: Rebecca Taylor [age 35]
Label: Fiction Records [subsidiary of Univeral]

Official Video

Charts, Streams & Sales

UK (albums): #11
Spotify: Over 3.5 million
YouTube Music: Over 400 thousand
Mercury Prize Nominee 2022 [losing to Little Simz]
NME Best Albums of 2021: #4
The Guardian's Best Albums of 2021: #1
The Times Best Albums of 2021: #1

Instruments

Bass, drum machine, keyboards, synthesizer, violin

Details

• Self Esteem is the stage name of British singer Rebecca Taylor. Most soloists release music under their own name. When a person decides to use a moniker, it is therefore a deliberate choice that imposes a level of artifice upon their work, serving as a dividing line that separates the person from their persona. Instead of being an extension of the singer, the songs become carefully constructed things in their own right, designed for a specific purpose, as opposed to a naked expression of the singers inner life.
  
  The internal life is still expressed, but more selectively, in a way that has additional layers of sophistication. Taylor describes the themes of "sex, sense of self, heartbreak and defiance" as always present in her music. Indeed, when thinking of a name for herself, the two candidates she had in mind were 'Sex Appeal' and 'Self Esteem'.
  
  
  
  When an artist includes certain themes in their work they also, inevitably, exclude others, in a way that's revealing. Self-esteem, the concept, has for an ugly sister self-doubt, and we most often yearn for a thing when we have the lack of it. For example, it's the starving person who can't stop thinking about food, while the well-fed have their minds occupied with other pursuits.
  
  This delicate balance, between confidence and doubt, self-acceptance and shame, resonates in the work of Self Esteem, and for me, is what makes it so interesting. 'Prioritise Pleasure' is about self-acceptance and being unafraid to chase your goals, but it's self-acceptance in the face of social pressure to conform to the stereotype of a demure woman who prioritises other people above herself. The tone is positive, but the overall context, standing-up against a judgmental society, is one fraught with conflict.
  
  Rebecca Taylor is, in her own words, "a big girl, a sturdy girl", in an industry obsessed with painfully thin beauty standards that border on the abusive. It must take confidence for her to stand on stage and say "this is me! I'm not perfect, and that's okay." Yes, from behind a guise, but the guise provides her with the space necessary to come into the public eye as an imperfect person, and challenge those very notions of perfection, by daring to be flawed in the spotlight.  
  
  
• Taylor is such a big fan of Queen that she designed her logo to look like the signature of Freddie Mercury.
• 'Prioritise Pleasure' is in a 3/3 time signature.
  
  
• The music on 'Prioritise Pleasure' is brash, bold, pulsing, sexual and self-indulgent. It tells a story of a woman realising her lifestyle of late nights and casual sex isn't bringing her happiness and the narrative thread of one song carries over into the next. 'I Do This All the Time' literally ends mid-verse. By the end of the album, there's a sense of hard-earned personal growth and self-acceptance, made valuable because of the bruises Taylor picked up along the way.
  
  

Artwork