How Can I Help You

Self Esteem's "How Can I Help You" is art-pop as confrontation — Rebecca Lucy Taylor turning the language of customer service into a weapon. The production is stark and theatrical: gospel-tinged backing vocals, marching percussion, and dramatic dynamic swells that frame the track like a stage piece rather than a radio single. Taylor's delivery shifts from deadpan poise to full-throated indignation, her British alto wielding politeness as a blade before tearing the mask off entirely. The lyric skewers the performance of accommodation women are conditioned into — the customer-service smile, the swallowed resentment, the labor of being palatable — and detonates it with a withering refrain. There's menace beneath the choral grandeur, a sense of barely-leashed fury dressed in show-tune clothes. This is post-Prioritise Pleasure Self Esteem, where pop maximalism serves feminist catharsis, and the arrangement's swing between restraint and eruption mirrors exactly the emotional whiplash of suppressed rage. Culturally it belongs to the lineage of theatrical British pop provocateurs, knowing and literate, equally at home in a queer club and a critic's year-end list. It's a song for reclaiming your own teeth — to play loud when you're done being accommodating, when you want art that names the exhaustion of constant niceness and then sets it on fire. Fierce, witty, and unapologetically grand.