Now is an eye-opening time for Celeste. When the Brighton-raised singer-songwriter released her debut album ‘Not Your Muse’ in January 2021, she couldn’t play it live because of the pandemic. A year earlier, she had topped the BBC’s Sound of 2020 poll and won the BRITs’ Rising Star award, so she grabbed the offers that flooded in and built an audience “mainly from television” performances.
But this time around, she’s getting feedback in real time as she previews ‘Woman Of Faces’, her adventurous second album, at intimate gigs across the UK. “Whenever I get to perform live, I feel so much more seen for who I truly am,” Celeste says. She’s pleased that audiences are really embracing the widescreen title track, on which she grapples with the fact that “as a woman, I’m expected to be so many different things”.
When she appears on Zoom today, Celeste confides that she’s feeling “a bit tired” after a few weeks away from home, but this doesn’t stop her from speaking thoughtfully and absorbingly for well over an hour. “I’ve got three days off, so I won’t be talking much after this!” she says with a smile.
Released this Friday (November 14), ‘Woman Of Faces’ features grand cinematic ballads that explore the challenges of being a female artist (‘On With The Show’, the Liza Minnelli-inspired title track) and soulful show-stoppers with empowering lyrics (‘Time Will Tell’, ‘This Is Who I Am’). It’s bolder and more bracing than Celeste’s pop-speckled debut, especially when she rails against the harmful effects of technology on ‘Could Be Machine’. This electro belter showcases her stunning voice in a starker way than before.
Celeste says it’s partly inspired by the “subtle aggressive communications” that artists deal with on social media. “There was someone in particular [a troll] that would make a lot of accounts, then comment on my accounts and send me messages that weren’t very nice,” she recalls. But ‘Could Be Machine’ was also inspired by another distressing period in which she received “abuse from an ex-lover” through her phone. “This was every day for a few months,” she says. “You don’t really know what to do about it, because so much of your life exists on your phone.”
Surprisingly, Celeste says her live performances of ‘Could Be Machine’ are even “spikier” than the album version, and closer to her original vision. Earlier in the recording process, this song and several others had string arrangements by Robert Ames of the London Contemporary Orchestra. Celeste describes him approvingly as having a “resistance to the usual classical rules and styles”, but his contributions got scrubbed. “The producer of the album… he didn’t let me use Robert Ames’ arrangements,” she says. “He wanted to use an arranger he’d worked with for a long time.”
‘Woman Of Faces’ was produced by Grammy winner Jeff Bhasker, who has previously worked with Harry Styles and Lana Del Rey, and features string arrangements by Rosie Danvers, whose credits include Stormzy and Olivia Dean. Celeste stresses that she really respects Danvers’ work. “I just think that when you’re the artist, you can be very self-critical and hyper-aware of the specificity of what it is you’re trying to convey,” she says.
Celeste has always been candid about her music. While she was promoting ‘Not Your Muse’, she admitted that its radio-friendly single ‘Stop This Flame’ wasn’t among her favourites on the album. This jazzy toe-tapper has soundtracked everything from a Peloton ad to Sky Sports’ Premier League coverage, but Celeste says she’s happy it’s been “overtaken” by ‘Strange’, a smoky slowburn that is now her most-streamed song on Spotify.
“It’s taken a while to break the banner of what ‘Stop This Flame’ did [for me] at a certain point,’ she says. ‘But I think what happens when you have a piece of music that’s so pushed – like, so much [effort] is put into it being heard – is that it falls into certain hands and a certain audience. And then, naturally, the other music you have falls into different hands.” For Celeste, ‘Strange’ felt like a more “authentic” reference from which to build her new album.
This tension – between being pushed in one direction by industry forces, and pulled in another by her own creativity – has been a constant. When she was 18, Celeste turned down a record deal because it involved working with musicians she felt no affinity with. Four years later, in 2016, she signed to Lily Allen‘s Bank Holiday Records and released ‘Daydreaming’, her neo-soul-flavoured debut single.
Celeste built further buzz with the following year’s ‘The Milk & The Honey’ EP and a month-long residency at West London venue Laylow, then signed to major label Polydor (Becky Hill, Ellie Goulding) in 2018. The singles ‘Strange’ and ‘Stop This Flame’ continued her forward momentum before her debut album ‘Not Your Muse’ stormed to Number One in the UK in January 2021. Two months later, she earned an Oscar nomination for ‘Hear My Voice’, a pleading ballad she co-wrote and recorded for The Trial of the Chicago 7.
The rollout for ‘Woman Of Faces’ has been rather bumpier. In a series of Instagram stories shared on October 23, she accused Polydor of showing “very little support towards the album that I have made” and claimed she was threatened with being dropped if “she didn’t put two particular songs” on the track list. NME reached out to the label for comment at the time, but did not receive a response.
“The industry thinks what is commercial in a female artist is being serviced out as something sexy, but not too potent and challenging for the male psyche”
Celeste also opined that the “male-dominated” music industry is responsible for keeping women in a “subservient narrative” and a “repeat narrative of tragedy”. Today, she doesn’t speak about relations with her label, which is understandable with her album about to drop, but she does expand on her comments about endemic sexism.
“I think that women remaining in this perpetual state of [singing about] doom and heartbreak is a really hard one to escape,” she says. In Celeste’s eyes, the problem is that young female artists are invariably paired with male songwriters who learned their studio methods from their predecessors: men of a less enlightened generation.
“So they’re coming in with [this set idea] of where a woman sits in the room,” Celeste continues. “There’s this predisposition that you are just the singer, and you deliver the message that the [male] songwriter is going to make for you. They’re going to make you a star, because they know what people want.”
Though the public is hungry for a range of narratives, Celeste says many songwriters stick with the same old reductive tropes. “This narrative of longing for a man’s love or being broken at a man’s feet is just very unempowering,” she says. “But the people who are still in positions of power [in the industry], unfortunately, sit within these ideologies. They think what is commercial in a female artist is being serviced out as something sexy, but not too potent and challenging for the male psyche.”
Celeste has no problem with being challenging. In January, she dropped ‘Everyday’, a glorious alt-rock swirler which samples Death In Vegas‘ gothronica track ‘Dirge’. It doesn’t appear on ‘Woman Of Faces’, but Celeste says she has “a lot of songs – demos – that are more in that energy”. Some of her new unreleased material even channels Siouxsie and the Banshees. “The major label [album] cycle doesn’t always allow you to show what you are at that exact moment in time,” she says. “But I’ve just had some conversations with my label recently, which may mean that things are changing.”
Along the way, she is also recalibrating how she measures success. “I’ve always wanted to be one of the biggest singers in the world,” Celeste says. “But I [also] need people to support me in being truthful to my values. What I’m saying to myself now is: recognise what you have within yourself and don’t be afraid to take risks.”
Celeste’s ‘Woman Of Faces’ is out November 14 via Polydor Records