The London Songstress: Her Latest Album Review – Melancholy Transformed Beautifully by Streetwise Soul and Clever Wordplay

Within the overcrowded music industry, where musicians are encouraged to maintain a constant presence and stream of what many call “content”, south London artist Joy Crookes’s career has advanced in a curious series of fits and starts.

After releasing a number of extended plays, she ended 2019 as a hotly tipped act: performances on a major TV show, shortlisted for the Brits Rising Star award, ranked prominently in the BBC’s Sound of 2020, and invited to open for a global superstar on tour.

However, that opportunity was canceled by the pandemic, and her real commercial breakthrough didn’t arrive for nearly two years: launched late in 2021, her debut album Skin made the Top 5 and, in Feet Don’t Fail Me Now, produced one of those slow-burning successes that gains a weird omnipresence even without reaching the Top 30.

She began crafting a follow-up, then vanished again. The four years that separate her first release from Juniper were at least partly taken up by a time when she was “quite unwell” and “mentally unstable”.

A Deeply Personal Record

That difficult time understandably hangs over the contents of Juniper: “I’m so sick, I’m exhausted, I can’t go on like this,” she voices on opener Brave; “I’m deeply unhappy,” states the honest hook of Mathematics, ostensibly a breakup song that appears rooted 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 incisive, social commentary about Brexit, urban change and immigration that appeared on Skin – but Crookes is an remarkably sharp wordsmith who appears as intelligent, streetwise and outspoken regardless of the emotional challenges she’s describing.

Avoiding Platitudes

Additionally, she rigorously swerves the typical positive affirmations about the kind of topics Juniper addresses, from unhealthy attachments to intergenerational trauma.

One poignant track, about toxic dynamics, and another song, about impossible ideals, are all the more powerful for their subtle handling and avoidance of sentimentality in favour of cleverness.

The latter rejects pat conclusions about the importance to love yourself or how everyone is beautiful, and instead concludes unreconciled, with Crookes still looking bitterly at its “peng” main subject: “Why am I working double for just half of what you got?”

Innovative Sound

Her sound is similarly an strikingly original and individual take on the familiar. The songs have big choruses and catchy tunes – powerful enough, in the case of Carmen, that it holds its own despite its instrumentation incorporating something as instantly familiar as the distinctive keys from a classic hit.

It’s easy to label their style as neo-soul retro-soul: Wurlitzers and Philadelphia International strings; rich, live-sounding bass and drums; the occasional touch of distortion on Crookes’s vocals, which slip from husky intensity and lightly jazz-inflected to more conversational, hip-hop-flavored rhythms.

Dreamy Soundscapes

It might come across as ordinary, but it doesn’t, because it’s filtered through an delicately hazy filter. Synthesizers, harp strings and organ notes glow and drift abstractly around the sound, the aural equivalent of glimpsing something in the periphery.

She uses generous amounts of dub reggae-esque echo; each element has a dreamlike, late-night quality. Listening to the deep low-end of Perfect Crime, or Pass the Salt, driven by a incredible sample taken from a French icon and including a short yet fiery cameo from Vince Staples, you sense that Crookes has an deep appreciation for trip-hop in its earliest, innovative form.

Diverse Inspirations

It joins Crookes’s admirably eclectic roll call of influences: it’s rare to find a lot of singer-songwriters in today’s music scene name-checking Black Uhuru, the folk-punk pioneers and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in conversations.

One Minor Stumble

It missteps once. First Last Dance feels unexpectedly upbeat given the atmospheric company it’s keeping, a state of affairs not improved by its melody, which has a distinct 80s Euro-pop vibe.

But one distracting stumble is hardly significant given how strong the rest of Juniper is, how definitively it showcases Crookes’s talent as a vocalist and songwriter.

A Welcome Return

There are some big names here – in addition to Staples, Kano appears on Mathematics, while a rock star contributes vocals to Somebody to You – but the main attraction never feels overshadowed or overpowered.

Crookes has expressed concern about the delay between her second album and her debut: “Will people still care?” she wondered aloud recently. You can understand why, but Juniper shows itself worth anticipating.