\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>n an overcrowded pop market, where artists are encouraged to maintain a constant presence and stream of what\u2019s depressingly termed \u201cproduct\u201d, south London singer-songwriter Joy Crookes\u2019s 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 \u2026 With Jools Holland, nominated for the Brits Rising Star award, placed high in the BBC\u2019s Sound of 2020 poll, invited to support Harry Styles on tour. But the latter was nixed by Covid, and her real commercial breakthrough didn\u2019t arrive for nearly two years: released at the tail-end of 2021, her debut album Skin made the Top 5 and, in Feet Don\u2019t 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 \u201creally sick\u201d and \u201cmentally unstable\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/span>Joy Crookes: Juniper<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s a period that understandably hangs over the contents of Juniper: \u201cI\u2019m so sick, I\u2019m so tired, I can\u2019t keep losing my mind,\u201d she sings on opener Brave; \u201cI\u2019m pretty fucking miserable,\u201d 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\u2019s introspective tone comes at a cost \u2013 there\u2019s no room for the kind of sharp, political songs about Brexit, gentrification and immigration that peppered Skin \u2013 but Crookes is an impressively snappy lyricist who comes across as smart, streetwise and gobby regardless of the personal trauma she\u2019s describing.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cpeng\u201d titular character: \u201cWhy am I working double for just half of what you got?\u201d<\/p>\n The music is similarly an impressively fresh and individual take on the familiar. The songs have big choruses and strong melodies \u2013 strong enough, in the case of Carmen, that it isn\u2019t overshadowed by its backing track borrowing something as immediately recognisable as the staccato piano line from Elton John\u2019s 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\u2019s vocals, which slip from smokily powerful and lightly jazz-inflected to more conversational, rap-informed cadences.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/span>Joy Crookes: Perfect Crime \u2013 video<\/span><\/p>\n It could easily seem run of the mill, but it doesn\u2019t, because it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s admirably eclectic roll call of influences: you really don\u2019t get a lot of singer-songwriters in 2025 name-checking Black Uhuru, the Pogues and<\/em> Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in interviews.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n It missteps once. First Last Dance feels jarringly perky given the atmospheric company it\u2019s keeping, a state of affairs not much helped by its tune, which has a peculiar 80s Euro-pop quality. But one distracting stumble doesn\u2019t matter much given how strong the rest of Juniper is, how clearly it asserts Crookes\u2019s talent as a vocalist and songwriter. There are some big names here \u2013 as well as Staples, Kano turns up on Mathematics, while Sam Fender adds vocals to Somebody to You \u2013 but the main attraction never feels overshadowed or crowded out. Crookes has publicly worried about the gap between her second album and her debut: \u201cIs anyone going to remember me?\u201d she wondered aloud to one interviewer recently. You can understand why, but Juniper proves worth the wait.<\/p>\n Mark William Lewis \u2013 Petals<\/strong> In an overcrowded pop market, where artists are encouraged to maintain a constant presence and stream of what\u2019s depressingly termed \u201cproduct\u201d, south London singer-songwriter Joy Crookes\u2019s 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 \u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22795,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[13966,1403,13967,686,1085,13968,13970,6814,13969,10730,13971],"class_list":{"0":"post-22794","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-crookes","9":"tag-joy","10":"tag-juniper","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-review","13":"tag-sadness","14":"tag-snappy","15":"tag-soul","16":"tag-streetwise","17":"tag-sublime","18":"tag-wit"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22794\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}This week Alexis listened to<\/h2>\n
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\u2019s eponymous, addictive album.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"