Born in South London to a Bangladeshi mother and Irish father, Joy Crookes is a musician whose heritage has always firmly remained at the very core of her music, and her new album Juniper is no exception. With added gems on the album such as features from Vince Staples, Kano and even Sam Fender, who provides vocals on ‘Somebody to You’, this album has certainly been worth the wait.
Although she has been releasing music since an early age, starting out with covers on YouTube at just 13, it was her debut album, Skin, released in 2021, that really put her on the map. Skin was received with a flood of positive press, largely for Crookes’ honest portrayal of the intersectional complexities she has faced as a mixed-race woman growing up in London and a young female artist. The title song on this album is a disquieting insight into identity and belonging, and how she has learnt to come to terms with her body and her skin as she sings how “the skin that you’re given was made to be lived in” and “you’ve got a life worth living”, a theme that runs through the album.
In Juniper, we get an even closer look at Crookes’ unfiltered personality than we have with any of her previously released music. Crookes has such a bold, vibrant and witty personality, and she has made an album that sparks a newly found confidence and is exceedingly ‘Brave’; the opening track on the album, which aptly sets the precedent. In this song, she sings “I’m so sick and so tired, I can’t keep losing my mind” a line that explicitly references the difficult time she has faced over the past few years with her mental health, as she explains in an interview with the BBC, which also provides a key reason for the hiatus between her first and second album.
As the album continues, we see that Crookes has tightly squeezed as many of the intricacies and complexities of adulthood she has experienced into each song. The tracks fuse genres together, such as soft jazz, soul, R&B, and pop, and we can hear a pastiche of the likes of Amy Winehouse, as well as more recent artists like Raye and Olivia Dean. What these artists have in common is their lyricism and commitment to writing songs that come from their lived experiences and their soul, creating incredibly emotive music.
Crookes delves into unrequited love, heartbreak, generational trauma, societal expectations, identity and belonging, and so much more in her music. If Crookes has felt it, we are going to experience it.
What is so fresh is Crookes’ good sense of humour that is sprinkled- or rather dolloped- onto this album as she leaves no room for subtlety or subtext. The best example of this is the iconic, “I’m pretty but I’m miserable”, a wonderfully blunt line from ‘Mathematics’, a breakup song from the album released earlier this year, that does not leave us second-guessing how she is feeling. Furthermore, ‘Pass the Salt’, which has that wonderful R&B sound that is synonymous with Crookes, again, sets the precedent for an album filled with unfiltered truths as she sings, “Listen to this, I got plenty to get off my chest”.
There is a consistency running throughout, with ‘Pass the Salt’, ‘Perfect Crime’ and ‘Somebody to You’ in particular, all embodying that late night, jazz club vibe. The use of drums and other percussive instruments protrudes in these songs, creating intricate rhythms that just make you want to move.
Amidst the blunt lines, there are some incredibly witty lyrics and ideas at play. ‘House with a Pool’, for example, is one of the most beautifully written and poetic metaphors used to express unrequited love I have heard for some time, as she laments that “I got a house with a pool, but you don’t wanna swim” and “I could be drowning, but you don’t wanna get wet”.
Crookes has not stopped here with the seismic themes. Crookes then goes on to boldly cover the ramifications of generational trauma in ‘Mother’, expressing “I know it’s been bad… but, we don’t have to carry the past” and how she wants to “break the cycle”, another song reflective of her own experience and straight from the heart. Again, interestingly there are strong rhythms prevalent in this song that juxtapose the lyrics beautifully. This song is no typical slow ballad dissecting pain, and the strong, danceable beat is testament to Crookes’ general approach to life and recurrent messaging throughout the album that dancing and smiling through the hardships life throws is exactly how to get through it.
‘Carmen’ is a highlight on the album, offering a relatable exploration into comparison and identity, which comes with a well-thought-out music video that deserves a short-film award. It is packed with irony and her own unique humour as she adopts a blonde wig, an obnoxiously large fur coat and oversized sunglasses, embodying everything she thinks she wants to be and a visual representation of the type of person society rewards. She explicitly sings “I wanna be wanted like Carmen”, suggesting how she has felt marginalised due to the colour of her skin, “I get envious of that vanilla type”. She grapples with the morality of her emotions surrounding this complex feeling further in the line, “is it bad I want that for myself?”.
The tone changes again with ‘Forever’, a soft piano ballad where she sings about the fragility of love and life and how “tomorrow is never guaranteed”. She further writes that she “saw my mom make my dad cry As a child I learn’t there’s no Forever”, an agonising line showing Crookes getting older, and starting to see the cracks in a relationship that were masked as a child.
The album ends with ‘Paris’, a beautiful final track that signifies the journey Joy has been on regarding her sexuality. She explores repressed queer love and the religious guilt she has felt in the past in the lines “didn’t wanna f*ck with no more Catholic guilt’ and ‘kind of wanted you to be my girlfriend”.
Crookes proves with this album that she does not fit neatly into a category, whether that is with her personal identity or with her professional musical style – and neither should she. The record shows versatility, strength and bravery to discuss topics that are so relatable and emotionally complex, and every song has a distinct identity.
Words by Abbie James
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