Rebecca Taylor uncorks a lifetime’s worth of festering emotions in a darkly funny and always invigorating celebration of being too big, too bold, too much‘I think I might love myself, finally’: Rebecca Taylor interviewThe 50 best albums of 2021: the complete listMore on the best
music of 2021For many pop artists, the pandemic has been an exercise in downsizing.
Taylor Swift used the sudden lull to eschew big pop moments in favour of tactile folky electronica that soothed and sedated; Lorde and Billie Eilish returned with low-key albums crafted in lockdown that consciously side-stepped fame’s monstrous glare. These shifts mirrored a collective sense of introspection and reappraisal of what’s important. Stewing in your feelings was matched only by online quizzes when it came to lockdown hobbies.
Prioritise Pleasure, Rebecca Taylor’s brilliantly bold second album as Self Esteem, chimes with that theme of emotional wallowing – but it’s quickly alchemised into a heady rush of realisation. Feelings don’t just bubble on the surface, they rise up like spewing volcanoes, urgent and ugly. In a pop landscape that often seems to be bottling it all up inside, Prioritise Pleasure marked a hugely relatable uncorking of not just the past 18 months’ worth of festering emotions, but a lifetime of them.