Ones2Watch Home

Photo by Elsa Hammaren

I’m sure you have an artist in mind that you love listening to, that totally changes up their sound from record to record. It’s a daring choice, and the truth is that it doesn’t always come off well, and that’s where we could have found Nussy Andrews on her new record High Self Esteem, which is out Thursday, August 27th, but that’s not where we find her. She chose not to play it safe, and dared to be different. 

The title arrived as a dare instead of a mission statement, a fist raised in the air with producer Brayden Baird, said out loud in a tone Andrews describes as “ironically faux-positive.” It’s a joke the album centers its entire orbit around, all 11 tracks wonder what you’re supposed to do once you do with yourself once you stop mulling and stewing in the pits of despair. 

What makes this record work really well is its refusal to be eager to answer that question as well, it opens with a small but blunt admission by saying “And you say that I’m hopeless, like I don’t already know it, all the same” delivered by (as Andrews says herself) a comedic flatness before the strings arrive to layer this from a stand up comedy routine to a work of art. This trick is a well identified Andrews move, opening with self-deprecation, except here it functions less like a thesis and more like a held breath before the record lets itself do something new.

What comes next is built less around the confessional bareness of early demos and more around orchestration and that’s exactly what I think makes this next step in the evolution of Nussy Andrews come off so well. It’s confident, emotional, and layered in spectacular fashion like your favorite going out fit you’ll wear to doll yourself up. Listening to this record feels exactly like putting on your favorite pieces for a night out, with pianos, the jazz quartet, and orchestral color by the way of strings, trombone, accordion, and a Mellotron standing in for a children’s choir Andrews is done with despair (for now) and ready for her moment in the spotlight. 

The other thing this record does really well and what represents Andrews’ bravery to a tee is this complete change up from her original reflex of stripping things down to get closer to a wound, but instead adding more and more to decorate this record. As a trans woman, Andrews has spoken about the years she’s spent deliberately shrinking herself to avoid harm, and High Self Esteem represents really well what the opposite of that looks like in real time, it’s like a trial and error set to music. 

She described the record’s emotional path as angsty, then overly excited, then unpredictable, then sad, then sincere, then angsty again, before finally landing somewhere grateful after ping ponging around. In a way, this record not being so perfect and straightforward is exactly why it’s beautiful. It doesn’t try to be everything it could be in an idealized version of itself, but instead the process of pain and positivity act like a yin and yang and what comes out the other end is an incredible coming-of-age record from someone who’s arriving late to an adulthood she wasn’t even sure she’d get to have, and isn’t interested in faking her way through it gracefully. 

Whether this record earns its title by the final track or not is the kind of thing you have to sit with it until the end to figure out, but the fact that Andrews is asking it at all accompanied by a jazz quartet already marks a real departure from the artist who made her name in miniature, disappearing into her own bad opinions of herself. Nussy Andrews has proved she’s three things on this record: that she’s done hiding, that she’s pulled off this genre shift unlike any other, and that she’s ready to have high self esteem. 

Listen to High Self Esteem below: