By Lisa Wright
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Distil the special sauce of south London down to its raw ingredients and, according to Joy Crookes, it’s a mix of sharpness and charm. “If you can balance the two, that’s one of the best combinations of all time to me,” the Elephant and Castle-born singer grins. “You can stand your ground but be eloquent with it. I really enjoy that moment where you deal with something lightly even when the things you’re dealing with can be quite heavy or deep or misogynistic. To take all that and just be like, ‘Nope!’”
The 26-year-old’s just-released second album Juniper is full of such cheekily cutting quips. The follow-up to 2021 debut Skin — a record of personality-drenched, soul and jazz-infused social commentary that earned her two Brit nominations and a Mercury Prize nod — Juniper swaps much of its predecessor’s outward gaze for a deeper delve inward but loses none of its swagger and sparkle. “I shine and you get sunburn” goes a stand-out line on the Vince Staples-featuring Pass the Salt: a kiss-off to a toxic figure in her life. “I was gassed when I wrote that line because I really truly do feel that is accurate,” she chuckles. “Everyone has their own defence mechanisms and maybe mine is being a bit of a c*** back to people…”
When I speak to Crookes, she’s a few days out from the album’s release. Constantly pacing around, there’s a restless energy to the conversation that feels befitting of this period. Releasing an album, she says, “is the biggest amalgamation of emotions. There’s a huge part that’s underwhelming, there’s a huge part that’s overwhelming, there’s another part that’s terrifying. I could cry one minute and the next I’m like, ‘This is my job, on to the next one.’”
Juniper, especially, is causing a real see-saw of emotions, in part because there was a time when Crookes wasn’t sure it would ever materialise. Its title — the name of a particularly sturdy and storm-weathering tree — was a word that grew to encapsulate the years spent making it. “That’s why this week feels even crazier, because regardless of how people are gonna receive this record – which I have to kind of detach from — it means so much to me that I’m here to watch it be out; that I’m happy and on the other side of quite a difficult time.”
Crookes doesn’t need to worry about the critics; the reviews for Juniper have been unanimously positive. With a nuanced musical palette that’s cohesive yet far-reaching, ranging from the string-laced soul of Mathematics (featuring Kano) to an Elton John and Bernie Taupin credit on the Benny and the Jets-interpolating Carmen, it’s the point of view at the centre, however, that elevates the record from potential melancholy to something altogether snappier.
Second time around, though, there are bigger wins at play for the musician than the amount of stars splayed across her advertising billboards. Crookes acknowledges a period of acute mental health struggles in the past few years that left her trying to rebuild from the ground up, unable for a while to continue with the pop star duties that had swiftly become part of her remit. “Everyone talks about how much time I took between albums, but is that not just a human thing to happen?” she questions. “I had to get out of being in a funk, and it didn’t feel appropriate to be so public-facing and giving so much when I couldn’t really do that on a day-to-day basis.” Juniper, then, swiftly became a very different beast from Skin — one rooted in introspection and self-examination. “I decided to [focus on] what was hurting me rather than escaping it,” she says. “I was looking at it head on, and asking questions to try and make myself heal and move forward.”
Across the record, Crookes largely focuses her crosshairs on what she describes as “the gobshites that exist in my everyday”. House with a Pool yearns for love but gets a “f*** boy dipped in angel”; the aforementioned Carmen eulogises the sort of person automatically granted the keys to the kingdom while innately digging into society’s unequal beauty standards (“Brown-skin European with my London eye / I get envious of that vanilla type”). There are spectres of the music industry that seep in (I Know You’d Kill, in particular, is a defiant ode to the loyalty of her long-term manager) but, she shrugs, “obviously every woman in the music industry has a nightmare story or 10. I’m not really interested in that defining my career because f***ery is handed to you everywhere.”
It helps that she’s got a solid network of friends and peers on hand to help navigate those particular nightmares — people like Kate Nash and Jai Paul, whose “extremely rare stories” showed her that there’s no easy or obvious trajectory through this job. She also credits her parents for her resilience. “My parents are pretty scary,” Crookes smiles. “Not necessarily in a bad way, but my mum is very cheeky, my dad is really charming. My upbringing was really polarising but they’re extremely sharp.”
Born to a Bangladeshi mother and an Irish father, growing up in 2000s Elephant and Castle was, she says, a richly multicultural and formative experience. “I would not be the artist I am without the London I grew up in, for sure,” she affirms. Yet these days, the streets are largely unrecognisable from the ones of her youth. Though Juniper steps away from much of the social commentary of Crookes’s previous material, the fire that fuelled those tracks clearly still burns bright.
“It’s completely upsetting and traumatising if you’re someone that’s had the privilege to grow up in a time and place where there was just more community and care and design — and ‘design’ sounds like a weird word to use but I don’t mean it in an Ikea way, I just mean there were more intricacies and nuances, whereas now people are doing matcha raves,” she says. “That’s indicative to me of gentrification of course, but also late-stage capitalism where everything is becoming homogenised. There’s no individuality anywhere, let alone south London.”
Of course, right now there’s a larger threat to the city than just an upsurge in overpriced mint-green drinks. Crookes was at home on September 13 when Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally descended upon central London, and feels that there’s a bigger responsibility on artists than ever to use their platforms and make their politics known. “I wish it wasn’t important. If politicians were doing their jobs, we would probably not have to be beacons of hope and so vocal, but unfortunately that’s what’s become of this time,” she says. “It’s terrifying to have that many people on the street that believe in quite scary things. That is threatening to anyone — even other white people.
“The world’s become a lot scarier a place and I become really fearful at times, for sure. But also we live in a time where there is a moral litmus test and there are people that disagree that there is a genocide, which we are literally watching in 4k. I’m unsurprised but also heartbroken by the world we live in because it feels like people are getting away with murder and the rise of the Right is a genuine threat. And that’s not a debate, it’s a fact.”
Juniper might have been birthed from a difficult time, but like its namesake evergreen, its author has come out fighting, with a twinkle in her eye and a piece of her mind ready for any ill forces that might deserve it. Like she said, it’s that classic south London combination of sharpness and charm, and on her latest, Joy Crookes is uniting the two with inimitable style. “I think it’s a classic mid-twenties album where I had to shed lots of things to make room for growth, but I got to the other side,” she smiles. “Genuinely, now I feel the best I’ve ever been.”
Juniper is out now. Joy Crookes plays the O2 Academy Brixton on November 18 & 19
