When I saw Nussy Andrews live a few weeks ago, she spent most of her set offstage. Her bandmates spread out across the stage while Andrews sat at her piano below it, facing the wall—a pretty on-the-nose spatial manifestation of the scene she places herself in on her ballad “Cassandra Bird”: “If life’s a cabaret / I’m far from center-stage / I’ll be the scenery, a periphery, estranged.” In her self-made orchestra pit, hunched over her keys, Andrews is an illustrious narrator and expert commander of attention—and the crowd curls itself around her, peering over her shoulders in a collective lurk. Her new album, High Self Esteem, evokes a similar image: pressing your face to the windows of a beautiful yet ramshackle mansion and watching Andrews pace among its mess, singing to herself. Her songs unfurl like the kinds of hypothetical arguments you rehearse alone, her musings carried on the stream of her marbled alto. I’ll describe High Self Esteem as “theatrical” to get this inevitable adjective out of the way early, though Andrews, an ex-theater kid, was put off by the rigid vocal beauty standards often enforced in musical theater training. She found inspiration in jazz standards and the textured voices of singers like Billie Holiday and Nina Simone—North Stars to another artist Andrews is frequently compared to, Fiona Apple. Without smoothing out the rocky edges of her voice, Andrews maintains a central theatricality, which is to say, she is a natural storyteller and a dynamic leading lady. After a 90-second overture—in which a Broadway-ready piano riff dashes up and down the scales, trailed by a flurry of strings, horn blasts, rogue doorbell rings, and an angelic chorus consisting only of the album’s title—High Self Esteem gets its formal introduction, as does its heroine. “Terminal Damsel” is a quintessential “I Am” song. Unfazed by the knife fight between violin and cello, Andrews plunks out a stuttering melody and bemoans her unsavable fate: “I’m a blade slung both ways / Carving totems out of pain,” she sings. “I crave the dull / Yet I’m supposed to feel it all / Or so it seems.” Wordy and hyper-physical as “Terminal Damsel” is, it’s only a blink of the capaciousness of Andrews’ artistry demonstrated across High Self Esteem, as she repeatedly takes herself apart and puts herself back together in a series of self-sacrifices at her own altar. In the record’s darkest moments, such all-encompassing acts feel like the only option. On the bassy and country-tinged “More? Oh Lord,” Andrews takes to task the forces that try to shrink women, both physically and metaphorically: “I cauterized the best of me under an illusion of salvation through the less of me,” she sings, detailing struggles with disordered eating and eventually coming to a rebellious conclusion: “Oh my lord, I have to be more!” Other times, her attempts at salvation are not so victorious, like on the breakup song “Bear and Goose.” The cello grows low and draggy as the titular animals’ violent and imbalanced romance comes to a gruesome end: Bear eats Goose and continues stalking through the forest with her in his stomach. “Did they become one?” Andrews wonders, “Did goose even matter at all?”  On High Self Esteem’s six-and-a-half minute epic, “I Can Only Sing And I Must Scream,” which takes its title from Harlan Ellison’s similarly-named sci-fi horror short story, a dejected Andrews is reduced to “a thing that sings.” The track reaches its fever pitch during Andrews’ verse about v-coding, a carceral practice in which trans women are put in men’s prisons and knowingly subjected to sexual assault at the hands of violent male inmates. Andrews herself is trans, and the front-and-center placement of her vocals in the mix at this moment, strings pulled taut and distant behind her, makes the corner she’s been backed into more terrifying. “I wanna make you eat this pain and all I can do is sing,” she cries. Andrews’ expressions of discouragement throughout High Self Esteem reflect a world still trying to beat her into submission; other times, they’re accelerated expressions of devotion at the expense of self-preservation. “Til the rooster crows I’ll misuse Cupid’s bow / Knowing I’m the thing you’d like to get to know,” she sings as the acoustic guitar on “Pigeon’s Neck” blossoms and she begs the object of her desire to “throw the loving at me.” She’s also capable of some truly brilliant dark comedy. After the big band dies down on “Dinner Date,” Andrews plays the Stepford Wife in the song’s spiraling outro, a creepily idyllic minor-key melody that echoes the altered Dick and Jane passage that opens Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. She amps up the ridiculousness on “Interlude (Diffidence and Dissonance),” a sound collage centered around a verge-of-tears pep talk Andrews delivers to herself: “I sing very well if you close your ears / I play piano even better if you close your ears / This album is going to be great / Everyone is going to like this album / Everyone likes me / People think I’m cool / People think I’m normal / I’ve been normal since I was born.” It’s as hard to stifle a laugh as it is to keep yourself from reaching through the speaker system to hug her. High Self Esteem is Andrews’ most instrumentally grandiose record, so much so that it might feel overly ambitious, or at least it would if Andrews’ songwriting and vocal abilities were not so exhaustive, shedding light into every crack and dusty corner. Credit is due as well to Grammy-winning producer Ariel Loh, whose sound work is impeccably precise; each detail is meticulously placed, from the accordion that prances through “A Lily In Mid Bloom” to the soft gossamer curtain of Andrews’ backing vocals that throws itself over “Wantful Things” to the flourishes of studio chatter bookending the album.  High Self Esteem is a treasure trove of purposeful clutter, reflective of the multitudes its narrator contains. She describes herself better than anyone else could: “Matryoshkan and a linchpin and packed full of song.” While occasionally timid, Andrews never sounds as though she’s hiding out in the sweeping baroque arrangements that surround her; her voice gnarls through them, growing pains on full display. The shrinking violet becomes an unlikely star. [Self-Released] Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound, and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.