PROFILE
The righteous reinvention of Rebecca
There are lots of reasons why Rebecca Lucy Taylor AKA Self Esteem’s Prioritise Pleasure could, should and probably will win the 2022 Mercury Prize. For a flavour of them, you only need do a cursory sift of the critical acclaim heaped upon an album hailed as one of the best if not the very best of last year by most of the British music media.
“It’s a powerfully intense record that some may recoil from,” wrote Laura Snapes in a five-star review for, “confrontational top of their 2021 end-of-year list,declared “arenas surely beckon for a woman… who gave voice to fans who had thought nobody spoke for them”. I’ve little to add to all the praise other than one minor observation – perhaps crowded out among the litany of positive and poignant things to say around this record – about pop’s extraordinary power for reinvention, and the way Taylor embodies it so upliftingly.