Margate’s Self Esteem focuses on finding pleasure and taking the good bits of pop to make undaunted music, writes Rob Hakimian

“I’ve got a stupid slutty heart on my hip and it’s so shit! It’s embarrassing and I want it gone from my life,” Rebecca Lucy Taylor tells me over Zoom from her Margate flat. She’s discussing the arresting portrait on the album cover for Prioritise Pleasure, her second album as Self Esteem. “They wanted to do lots of retouching and I had to say ‘No, no, I don’t want any of that, don’t change anything’. But then I did get tantalised by being able to take the tattoo off – and I’ve been transparent about that.”

This, in a nutshell, is Taylor’s intention with Self Esteem: self-empowerment, body positivity and full swear-tastic transparency on everything that’s on her mind, which could be anything from sexting to depression to shaving her pussy. With this new album in particular, the headline message is that putting yourself first is not a sin. “It all comes back to loving yourself. It makes you a much better person in the world,” she affirms. “Your intentions are better because you’re not doing it for everyone else.”

Which brings us back to the cover of Prioritise Pleasure, where Taylor proudly flexes in a skin-tight black leotard, thigh-high black leather boots and a cowboy hat. “The whole point is enjoying my body for me. I enjoy being myself, a sexual being,” she says. “I just want to look fucking hot for me and I want you to go ‘Oh my gosh!’ – but that’s not for anybody else, and that’s the point of it.”

This desire to be fully herself is what sparked the Self Esteem project in the first place. After a decade in the underappreciated cult band Slow Club, during which they released five albums, toured constantly and made little headway, she had had enough. She didn’t want to be the drab, jeans-and-T-shirt-wearing, picked-on ‘girl in a band’ anymore. She didn’t want to compromise her artistry to fit the mould of an indie act – she knew she had pure pop potential within her. “I just really wanted to do what I’m doing now, desperately, without being challenged,” she reflects. “I think people could always see it was there in me.”

“I just really wanted to do what I’m doing now, desperately, without being challenged”

— Self Esteem

Following Slow Club’s split in 2017, Taylor was unmoored. She didn’t want to remain in her native Sheffield, she couldn’t afford to live in London, and thus found herself drawn to Margate, where some of her friends from the record label Moshi Moshi had already migrated. “I love the sea and being able to live alone, and having somewhere I can paint was always my dream,” she says. “And I also like the space it gives your brain because it’s a slower pace and quieter. I needed that to decompress and think about what to do next.”

Another big draw to the area was the presence of Johan Karlberg, member of the electronic Afropop group The Very Best, whose Electric Beach studio is tucked away just behind Dreamland. “It was a struggle for a while to find someone to make the work with, but Johan’s got exactly the brain I need,” Taylor says. “If you put me in a room with him, then I’ll come out with something really fun. We rarely have days where we’re like ‘Fuck, nothing worked today’ and, as an impatient person that doesn’t like wasting time, that works for me.”

On her debut album as Self Esteem, Compliments Please, Taylor came into her own as a cuttingly honest, deeply self-scathing and finger-on-the-pulse songwriter and performer. With Prioritise Pleasure, she’s taken all those elements up several more notches. “I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever made in my whole career,” she says. “It’s very much what I want to say.”

Describing what sets herself apart from the rest of the crowd, she says: “I think of myself as a Trojan Horse, where you think you’re getting pop music but actually end up getting all the good bits of pop music, the sonic excitement, but then lyrically it’s very vulnerable, authentic and honest.”

She invokes Kanye West, Kate Bush, Rihanna and Perfume Genius as her musical touchstones, while the works of Tracy Emin and Marina Abramovich have been her guiding lights when she’s “a bit lost or getting disillusioned.”

The first examples of this bigger, bolder sound have been unleashed in the early singles I Do This All The Time and Prioritise Pleasure. On the former, Taylor took inspiration from Baz Luhrmann’s 1997 cultural oddity Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen), which she describes as “one of the greatest things ever”.

Of course, I Do This All The Time is still unmistakably Self Esteem, as she delivers a magnetic spoken-word soliloquy that encompasses a roost full of anxieties, from feeling awkward around friends with babies to sending long paragraph texts, and she fills the final verse with the kinds of things she was told throughout her years in Slow Club (“All you need to do darling is fit in that little dress of yours / If you weren’t doing this you’d be working in McDonald’s”). However, she punctuates these spiralling thoughts with big choral blasts, reminding her to “Look up, lean back, be strong” – a radiant sound that has already seen the song playlisted on BBC Radio and won her a legion of empathetic new fans.

In the videos for the singles, we see Taylor and her backing band dressed in all-black, a clear and noted tribute to Madonna, particularly her 1990 Blond Ambition tour. “She really put on a show and she worked fucking hard,” Taylor affirms. “And it wasn’t saying nothing; it was so fucking politically radical to be a woman that loved herself, her body, her sex life – and look how much it ruffled people’s feathers. It’s pathetic. I’m endlessly inspired by her because I’m a woman who has been told to shut up her whole life.”

She’s also going to be channelling this spirit and attitude on her ambitious live tour, which she’ll be taking around the country, including a hometown stop at Margate’s Elsewhere. “I fucking hate boring gigs,” she states, having played countless gigs in Slow Club where she felt they weren’t using the stage to its full potential. This is something she’s going to redress with Self Esteem. “I always want to make sure the show is one where you can’t go to the toilet, you have to stay,” she says. Part of this is a fully choreographed show with her backing dancers. “Who knows if I’ll manage it,” she laughs. “But we’re all taking it very seriously. We’re on a Strictly Come Dancing journey with it.”

An early glimpse of this kind of set-up was displayed in her recent appearance on Jools Holland, which she reflects on in typically flippant form: “It’s been 14 years hoping to be on that show, so it was pretty cool to see. It’s nice not to have to be annoyed about not being on it – for a while.”

As far as other bucket list items, Taylor’s just announced her debut book will be out early next year and she has a couple of plays in the works – but she’s remaining surprisingly humble. “I want to be someone who gets invited to the Glamour Awards. I don’t need to be nominated, I just want the free stuff,” she jokes. Then, more saliently, adds “I want to not have to worry about getting a job or the numbers on Spotify. I just want to keep making the work, that’s my absolute goal. Nothing’s ever certain, but it feels better this time – a little bit less stressful. So here’s to carrying on not feeling stressed.”

INSTA: @selfesteemselfesteem