The London Songstress: Her Latest Album Analysis – Melancholy Made Sublime by Urban Soulfulness and Clever Wordplay

In an overcrowded music industry, where musicians are encouraged to maintain a constant presence and stream of what’s depressingly termed “content”, south London singer-songwriter Joy Crookes’s career has progressed in a unusual series of stops and starts.

Following the release of a number of extended plays, she ended 2019 as a hotly tipped artist: appearances on a major TV show, nominated for the Brits Rising Star award, placed high in the influential music poll, and invited to support a global superstar on tour.

However, that opportunity was nixed by the pandemic, and her major success didn’t arrive for almost 24 months: released at the tail-end of 2021, her debut album Skin made the Top 5 and, in Feet Don’t Fail Me Now, produced one of those long-tail viral hits that gains a strange ubiquity even without reaching the Top 30.

She started working a follow-up, then vanished again. This extended period that separate her debut from Juniper were in large part consumed by a period when she was “quite unwell” and “mentally unstable”.

An Introspective Record

That difficult time understandably hangs over the themes of Juniper: “I’m so sick, I’m exhausted, I can’t go on like this,” she sings on opener Brave; “I’m pretty fucking miserable,” states the honest hook of Mathematics, seemingly a breakup song that seems underpinned by something noticeably darker than romantic woe alone.

One might say that Juniper’s self-reflective mood has its trade-offs – there’s no room for the kind of incisive, social commentary about Brexit, urban change and migration that peppered Skin – but Crookes is an remarkably sharp lyricist who comes across as smart, streetwise and outspoken despite the personal trauma she’s describing.

Avoiding Platitudes

Additionally, she rigorously swerves the typical positive affirmations about the kind of topics Juniper tackles, from co-dependency to family legacy pain.

House With a Pool, about abusive relationships, and Carmen, about impossible ideals, are all the more powerful for their light approach and rejection of melodrama in favour of wit.

The latter rejects easy answers about the importance to love yourself or how everyone is beautiful, and instead concludes unreconciled, with Crookes still looking bitterly at its “attractive” main subject: “Why am I working double for only a fraction of what you got?”

Innovative Sound

The music is likewise an impressively fresh and individual take on the familiar. The songs have big choruses and catchy tunes – powerful enough, in the case of Carmen, that it isn’t overshadowed even when its instrumentation incorporating something as instantly familiar as the staccato piano line from Elton John’s Bennie and the Jets.

It’s easy to label their style as post-Amy Winehouse vintage-inspired: electric pianos and lush orchestration; rich, organic bass and drums; the occasional touch of grit on Crookes’s voice, which transition between husky intensity and lightly jazz-inflected to more laid-back, rap-informed cadences.

Dreamy Soundscapes

It could easily seem run of the mill, but it doesn’t, because it’s filtered through an appealingly gauzy filter. Synthesizers, harp strings and organ shimmer and flutter abstractly around the sound, the aural equivalent of glimpsing something in the periphery.

There are liberal applications of spacious reverb; everything has a dreamlike, nocturnal quality. Listening to the deep low-end of Perfect Crime, or Pass the Salt, driven by a fantastic drum loop sourced from Serge Gainsbourg and featuring a brief but explosive guest verse from Vince Staples, you get the feeling that Crookes has an deep appreciation for 90s electronica in its original, innovative form.

Eclectic Influences

It joins Crookes’s notably diverse roll call of influences: you really don’t get a lot of artists in today’s music scene name-checking reggae legends, the folk-punk pioneers and qawwali masters in conversations.

A Rare Misstep

There’s one stumble. A particular song feels unexpectedly upbeat given the moody surroundings it’s keeping, a state of affairs not improved by its melody, which has a peculiar synth-pop vibe.

But one distracting stumble doesn’t matter much given how strong the majority of Juniper is, how definitively it showcases Crookes’s talent as a vocalist and songwriter.

A Welcome Return

Several famous artists here – in addition to Staples, a grime veteran appears on Mathematics, while Sam Fender contributes vocals to Somebody to You – but the main attraction never feels overshadowed or overpowered.

Crookes has expressed concern about the delay between her sophomore release and her debut: “Will people still care?” she wondered aloud not long ago. It’s understandable, but Juniper shows itself worth anticipating.