Self Esteem - A Complicated Woman

“It’s just another new mountain to climb, but I know that at the top is where the next hill starts”.

Music is, in many ways, an art of fine balances. The balance between confidence and self-awareness, the balance of tone, the balance of being just the right amount of loud and unapologetic, the balance between sincerity and pretentiousness - all of these are crucial when creating music, especially music that aims for a self-affirming, empowering tone. And what happens when those balances are not maintained? The answer is A Complicated Woman, the third studio album by English artist Self Esteem.

The album falls victim to all the same things that I could consider positives about it. The production work is really good, polished and tight, with really big crescendo moments and crisp instrumentation. At the same time, this polished feel takes away significantly from the somewhat punk-like attitudes that the album tries to go for on certain songs. The more experimental parts musically are largely well-executed, and some unconventional elements sound very cool. However, the experimentation that doesn’t land ends up costing several songs a great deal of coherence. The vocals are mostly quite pleasant and inoffensive, with a few standout moments on the positive side; but there are also standout moments on the negative side, where they fall into being annoying. I like a lot of the topics that Self Esteem writes about on this album; that said, I believe that she mishandles a lot of them, with the lyrics ending up sounding very cringey in places. This album unfortunately misses the same mark as Lambrini Girls did earlier this year on their debut Who Let The Dogs Out? - some parts of the album which were meant to show edgy, righteous energy and carefree, emphatic boldness end up sounding obnoxious and antipathetic. Arguably the best examples of this are the droning, extremely repetitive and simplistic hook of the second single, “69”, and the bizarre moaning in the outro of “Lies”.

There are definitely good tracks on the album - the opening two-track run of “I Do And I Don’t Care” and “Focus Is Power” is great; the closer “The Deep Blue Okay” is also a standout. The tracklist is very inconsistent, though, with a particularly rough middle section, and two of the worse tracks on the album, the aforementioned “Lies” and “69”, back-to-back towards the end.

Overall, it feels like, in some ways, “A Complicated Woman” is unsuccessfully attempting to capture something similar to “brat energy” - down to a few of the tracks having sonic similarities to Charli xcx’s landmark 2024 album, with the pulsing club beats and distorted, autotuned vocals. However, while perhaps able to replicate certain surface-level elements, it misses a lot of the finer details that made “Brat” so special - as well as lacking in poise and, in some cases, good taste.

4.5/10