In an overcrowded pop market, where artists are encouraged to maintain a constant presence and stream of what’s depressingly termed “product”, south London singer-songwriter Joy Crookes’s career has progressed in a curious series of fits and starts. After releasing a series of EPs, she ended 2019 as a hotly tipped act: appearances on Later … With Jools Holland, nominated for the Brits Rising Star award, placed high in the BBC’s Sound of 2020 poll, invited to support Harry Styles on tour. But the latter was nixed by Covid, and her real commercial breakthrough didn’t arrive for nearly two years: released at the tail-end of 2021, her debut album Skin made the Top 5 and, in Feet Don’t Fail Me Now, spawned one of those long-tail viral hits that achieves a weird omnipresence despite barely grazing the Top 30. She started working on a follow-up, then vanished again. The four years that separate her debut from Juniper were at least partly consumed by a period when she was “really sick” and “mentally unstable”.
Joy Crookes: Juniper
It’s a period that understandably hangs over the contents of Juniper: “I’m so sick, I’m so tired, I can’t keep losing my mind,” she sings on opener Brave; “I’m pretty fucking miserable,” runs the blunt chorus of Mathematics, ostensibly a breakup song that seems underpinned by something noticeably darker than romantic woe alone. You could argue that Juniper’s introspective tone comes at a cost – there’s no room for the kind of sharp, political songs about Brexit, gentrification and immigration that peppered Skin – but Crookes is an impressively snappy lyricist who comes across as smart, streetwise and gobby regardless of the personal trauma she’s describing.
Moreover, she rigorously swerves the usual self-help platitudes about the kind of topics Juniper addresses, from co-dependency to intergenerational trauma. House With a Pool, about abusive relationships, and Carmen, about unattainable beauty standards, are all the more powerful for their light approach and avoidance of sentimentality in favour of wit. The latter dispenses with pat conclusions about the need to love yourself for who you are or how everyone is beautiful in their own way, and instead concludes unreconciled, with Crookes still glowering resentfully at its “peng” titular character: “Why am I working double for just half of what you got?”
The music is similarly an impressively fresh and individual take on the familiar. The songs have big choruses and strong melodies – strong enough, in the case of Carmen, that it isn’t overshadowed by its backing track borrowing something as immediately recognisable as the staccato piano line from Elton John’s Bennie and the Jets. You could broadly categorise their style as post-Amy Winehouse retro-soul: electric pianos and Philadelphia International strings; warm, live-sounding bass and drums; the odd dusting of distortion on Crookes’s vocals, which slip from smokily powerful and lightly jazz-inflected to more conversational, rap-informed cadences.
Joy Crookes: Perfect Crime – video
It could easily seem run of the mill, but it doesn’t, because it’s filtered through an appealingly gauzy lens. Synths, harps and organ shimmer and flutter abstractly around the sound, the aural equivalent of catching something in the corner of your eye. There are liberal applications of dub reggae-esque echo; everything has a slightly woozy, late-night quality. Listening to the thick bassline of Perfect Crime, or Pass the Salt, driven by a fantastic drum loop sampled from Serge Gainsbourg’s 1968 single Requiem pour un Con and featuring a brief but explosive guest verse from Vince Staples, you get the feeling that Crookes has an abiding love for trip-hop in its original, experimental mid-90s form, before it sank into the realm of blandly inoffensive dinner party soundtrack. It joins Crookes’s admirably eclectic roll call of influences: you really don’t get a lot of singer-songwriters in 2025 name-checking Black Uhuru, the Pogues and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in interviews.
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It missteps once. First Last Dance feels jarringly perky given the atmospheric company it’s keeping, a state of affairs not much helped by its tune, which has a peculiar 80s Euro-pop quality. But one distracting stumble doesn’t matter much given how strong the rest of Juniper is, how clearly it asserts Crookes’s talent as a vocalist and songwriter. There are some big names here – as well as Staples, Kano turns up on Mathematics, while Sam Fender adds vocals to Somebody to You – but the main attraction never feels overshadowed or crowded out. Crookes has publicly worried about the gap between her second album and her debut: “Is anyone going to remember me?” she wondered aloud to one interviewer recently. You can understand why, but Juniper proves worth the wait.
This week Alexis listened to
Mark William Lewis – Petals
Poppily melodic, driven by bright, clean guitar, but off-kilter and somehow ineffably creepy, Petals is the perfect advert for the complex pleasures of the London singer-songwriter’s eponymous, addictive album.
