Review: CELESTE - "Woman Of Faces"

Celeste-Woman-Of-Faces-album-2025

The second album is always an area of turbulence: it is for anyone, but it becomes almost cruel for an artist who, on her debut, had conquered the heights of the public and critics.

And when the soul-pop landscape becomes populated with ambitious new voices, the expectations end up weighing like an extra layer of pressure. In this scenario, “Woman Of Faces” takes shape, Celeste's second chapter four years after the much more compact “Not Your Muse”.

The album was born through frictions that were anything but marginal. The singer spoke without filters about the frictions with producer Jeff Bhasker and the misunderstandings with the label: signs that something in the creative process didn't work as it should have. Yet Celeste still tries to preserve her own sound lexicon: that way of being both sumptuous and stripped down, elegant but crossed by painful veins.

The result is a dark, austere, proudly introverted work. “Woman Of Faces” doesn't look for shortcuts or nods to mainstream pop; it proceeds by chiaroscuro, in a territory that absorbs Winehousian suggestions, vocal jazz and a retro taste that does not disdain melancholic textures and smooth arrangements.

The title track immediately sets the posture of the record: enveloping strings and a character who “works so hard only to be replaced.”
It is a fresco of emotional precariousness that finds a counterpart in the openness On With the Show, where life deforms in a perpetual theater.

The album changes skin several times: from almost cinematic orchestrations we move on to bare-bones laments. The only recognizable pop glimmer comes with Could Be Machine, almost a powerful demonstration like Adele, a parenthesis that shows all its colors but does not veer towards compromise and ends with This is Who I Amthe artist's definitive statement.

“Woman Of Faces” is a record that asks for time, attention, willingness to listen slowly. It has a narrative coherence that fascinates, but it feels the weight of its own ambitions: it doesn't always manage to transform introspection into momentum, and at times it risks falling back on its shadows. However, it remains a solid, refined work, with moments of emotional clarity that confirm Celeste's authorial stature.

Not a misstep, not a triumph: an intermediate work, courageous in scale, which deserves an unhurried approach.