Celeste
“Woman of Faces”
Polydor Records
There’s something lurking in popular music. It’s a welcome throwback to a bygone sound of analog, the warm grooves of a record. It harkens back to the haunting voice of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” or the patient yearning of Sarah Vaughan’s excellent 1949 recording of “Black Coffee.”
It might be tough to hear for the untrained ear. And certainly not every megastar like Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter is tapping into this throwback feel yet (although you could argue that Carpenter does tap into a sense of fashion from this era).
But the English singer Celeste is embodying it all, painting these vintage musical milestones in a contemporary light with her stunning single “Woman of Faces,” the title track from her upcoming album of the same name out on Nov. 14 via Polydor Records.
It's not her first record. She broke big over in the U.K. and got an Oscar nomination in the States, but is far from a household name here even with favorable press. (The New York Times called her "a young singer with an old soul" back in 2021.)
This is a slow burn where Celeste opens up with nothing but her voice and sets a grim scene of a woman’s plight with her lyrics: “She is a woman of all faces / works so hard just to be replaced with / who really cares what she's made of?”
The piano slowly follows. You can see this song in your mind. Celeste sitting in a small smoky bar on a tiny stage, the spotlight on her and her piano, before the lights slowly pull back and the orchestra swells along as if to emphasize her emotive delivery: “Don't be surprised when she hurts you in time / when she spits on the rhyme of yesterday's life.”
We certainly don’t know the woman in the song. It seems like she might not know herself, based on the title. But on Celeste’s upcoming second album, which this track is the centerpiece of, we’re getting an idea of where Celeste wants to go – and that’s by looking back at iconic singers she’s modeling herself after, like Vaughan and Holiday before her.
It’s a welcome revisit to a bygone era that few singers today could tap into, but it’s a trend on the rise and Celeste is committed to capturing the moment.
