Self Esteem | DellaXOZ | Roland Faunte
Pitchfork Music Festival
Trabendo, Paris
3rd November 2025

As Self Esteem makes her first solo foray into Europe, Iain Key goes international for Louder Than War.

Self Esteem, aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor, has recently completed a month-long jaunt around the UK. I’d booked tickets for the first of the Manchester dates as soon as announced, having seen her on the I Tour This All The Time tour previously – there was no way I was going to miss this…

A handful of European dates were announced shortly before the aforementioned tour, just as I was considering what to do for my fiancées birthday… Paris… why not? And so with tickets purchased, travel and hotel booked, we found ourselves heading off on an early morning flight to attend one of the many events of the opening night of the Pitchfork Music Festival, which offers 100 artists over seven days appearing in 11 venues across the city.

I’ll be honest. I did no investigation into the venue in advance, so I was a little surprised to find the Trabendo, named after the 1999 album by the legendary French band Les Negresses Vertes, is a relatively intimate, purpose-built venue in the Parc de la Villette area of the city. When I say intimate, the capacity for the site is 700; however, for this gig, it’s around 300 at most.

Roland Faunte opens the evening, an American pianist who looks like he’s modelled himself on Andrew McCarthy in Pretty In Pink, performing like a young Billy Joel. From a modest start as Faunte introduces himself, he works and carries the crowd with him, many of whom, it would transpire, have turned up to see him specifically. There’s plenty of crowd interaction, and he gets us all to join in on the song Parachute. I imagine one of the dangers of performing in a country where your native language isn’t the most spoken is that there will be some things lost in translation, which leads the line, ‘All I need is a parachute’ to being misinterpreted as, ‘All I need is a pair of shoes,’ which results in a genuinely unplanned comical moment.

DellaXOZ is the first of the UK talent on show this evening, hailing from Bolton. I was expecting something electronic and dance-orientated, but what we get is the opposite: great guitar driven indie sound, with a Britpop influence, from the artist with a Congolese heritage. She’s been prolific over the last few years, and songs with titles such as I Fear Premature Death, But You Look Hot Smoking Cigarettes possibly bemuse the crowd but equally win them over. Definitely one to watch.

The anticipation builds as it’s time for our headliner. Along with ‘the locals’, there are also a number of Brits – those who live in Paris and a handful of us who’ve made the short trip over. After seeing Self Esteem in venues holding a few thousand, tonight’s gig is a rare opportunity. Whilst part of a wider festival, it feels more like a promotional event by the label in an effort to break the uber-talented Taylor into more international markets. After all, her music and lyrics are as relevant to individuals across the globe as much as folks in the UK.

Self Esteem’s set is slightly pared down tonight due to necessity, although it still runs to over an hour. Her touring posse contains just six members, and there’s no ‘live’ band. Unfortunately, that means there is no place for The Curse, but there is the opportunity to be so close to the performance that you can see every smile, wink and interaction between Taylor and troupe. She had admitted feeling a little grumpy about these European dates; however, it doesn’t show as we get much of A Complicated Woman and five tracks from Prioritise Pleasure. Although this may be one of her first trips to foreign soil as a solo artist, she has the crowd eating out of her hand from the off. There’s little room for banter as the artist delivers a condensed and meticulously choreographed tight performance.

As with many recent concerts, equal highlights of the evening are Cheers To Me and Deep Blue OK, slightly ahead of I Do This All The Time, with its added emotional input from a huge part of the audience, running a close second.

An absolute treat to see one of our greatest creatives/performers in a venue perhaps no bigger than your local village hall, one with the talent to be selling out the 6000 capacity Zénith Paris just a couple of hundred metres away…

~

All words by Iain Key. See his author profile here or find him via his LinkTree

Photos by Naomi Dryden-Smith (London show):  Louder Than War  | Facebook  |Twitter  | Instagram  | portfolio