Joy Crookes on self-discovery, sexuality, and second album 'Juniper' • Interview • DIY Magazine

Should Joy Crookes ever tire of crafting her gut-wrenching blend of neo-soul and R&B, she might consider narrating audiobooks, so smooth is her South London timbre as she recites the first verse of Candi Staton’s disco opus ‘Young Hearts Run Free’. “‘You get the babies, but you won’t have your man / While he’s busy loving every woman he can…’. It’s so fucked up!” she laughs. “This song is really sad, and everyone just be dancing….”

Five decades since Staton waxed eloquent on marital abuse over brass and congas, it’s now Joy who’s exploring the trope of ‘sad song, upbeat arrangement’ through her own prism on her second album ‘Juniper’. It’s a confessional, introspective effort that takes the richness of her 2021 debut ‘Skin’ as a starting point, but, this time, the mission statement was “go deeper”. “Whatever emotion [a song] is evoking, how far can you go down that rabbit hole?”

Two outstanding fruits of Joy’s labour are ‘House with a Pool’ and ‘First Last Dance’. Like ‘Young Hearts…’ they find the 26-year-old in radio-friendly territory, easy on the ear from Blue May’s glossy production (he also engineered most of ‘Skin’), however scratch beneath the surface and there’s more at stake. A slow jam with crunchy percussion that wouldn’t jut out from any study or coffee shop playlist, the first meditates on abusive relationships, informed by Joy’s own experiences and her observations of others’. It includes some of her most acute penmanship ever, and she knows it. ““In over my head / I could be drowning / You don’t wanna get wet”. Me and [co-writer] Jonny Lattimer double-dunk twerked on that one!” she beams, proudly.

The latter, meanwhile, manifests as a “love letter” to the anxiety Joy suffered throughout recording - over a bed of Kylie-tinged Europop, naturally. She recalls rocking up to a session around the time she was contending with regular vomiting attacks. “Everyone was like, ‘why are you here?’ Like, what else am I gonna do, stay at home and be anxious?” Collaborators Lattimer and Tev’n helped piece it together, including the Pulp Fiction inspired line “Feel like Travolta / Each time I hold ya”. “I was like, ‘my chest at the moment, you know that scene where they stab [Mia Wallace] with the needle because she’s taken way too much cocaine?’ They were like ‘yeah?’ and I was like, ‘well, that’s how it feels’.” She grins. “They were like ‘well, that’s a lyric!’”

“[‘Juniper’] is such an attractive word to me. It’s like a cooler way of saying resilient.”

Crookes may only be onto her second LP, but the Londoner has been professionally active for almost a decade, earning love for her era-bending soul displays as far back as 2017. ‘Skin’ received universal acclaim, a Mercury Prize nod, and carried her around the world with a set of songs that were as tender as they were ballsy, seeming to declare, ‘this is who I am; here’s why you should care’. A gifted vocalist and a voracious muso herself, she sounds equally at ease covering Kendrick Lamar as she does The Wannadies. She cites an expansive range of influences from Nina Simone to Joy Division, Marvin Gaye to Mac DeMarco, and she’s stoked to get nerdy about her practice with DIY. “Thank fuck,” she exclaims, on learning today’s chat is for a music magazine. “I tried to explain harmonics on Sunday Brunch. They were like, ‘we don’t get it but that sounds amazing!’”

Conscious to avoid the dreaded second album crisis, Joy returned to her earliest known working methods for ‘Juniper’. Echoing days spent tinkering in her childhood bedroom as a young wannabe, she chose “limitation” as a path forward. A back-to-basics approach removed distractions like lavish studios, “where everything’s at your disposal”. The mindset, as she puts it, was “if I write something good, it’s blatantly good, it’s not caked up in shite”. Composing initially on bass, “which doesn’t dictate harmonics”, she enjoyed needing to “search more” for toplines, which birthed cuts like infectious single ‘Perfect Crime’ with its duelling earworm melodies. The process wasn’t all peaches and cream, though. Joy recorded the entire album’s vocals in her voice notes, where it lived for a year and a half. “Which sounds cool for an interview,” she quips. But recreating “the play and the childlikeness” proved “a fucking ball ache”, and led to some “tense moments” in the studio.

Necessity being the mother of invention, she embraced a more technical role than ever before, at the encouragement of close friend and executive producer Harvey Grant. “He just turned to me and said ‘Mate, I think you need to sit the fuck down and get on the laptop’.” Despite initial fears, she found the process “liberating” and “really punk”, sticking to her dialled-down methodology even with the chance to go big. One work in progress featured “stems and stems of Abbey Road recorded strings”, she recalls. “Harvey has this story where [he’s like] ‘it was hilarious sitting on the sofa watching you mute these fucking thousand pound strings, like, nah, don’t want that one, don’t need it!’”

True to her vision, Joy flourishes on ‘Juniper’ when less eclipses more. In fleeting terms, on its luxe opener ‘Brave’, she ponders a choice she faced between love and loss when weathering rough mental health in the time since ‘Skin’ - although, she says, the emotions originate much earlier. “Touring and everything is a great distraction but I obviously had something bubbling up for years in the background I’d decided not to deal with, mentally.” When she found herself falling in love with someone, “it all came to the surface”. What appeared as “ugly traits” from the outside, she confesses, “were actually traits of someone with very specific traumas”. She faced a crossroads: continue distracting herself with hedonism - “aloof and in [my] own world” - or, frankly, focus on sorting out her shit. “It [felt] like, you can fuck around, but the play time’s gonna end at some point. No more Alaïas or Tabis, you’re gonna have to put on your fuckin’ Salomons and go on the hike!”

“Touring is a great distraction, but I obviously had something bubbling up for years in the background I’d decided not to deal with.”

If having ‘Brave’ as track one sets the intention of starting afresh, then bookending the record, ‘Paris’ - a leisurely rumination on self-assurance and sexuality - suggests she was successful. “I feel like that’s one of the best songs I’ve ever done. Because I went there. I really sent it on that song,” she asserts. “I felt myself falling into a state of flow while recording it, and allowed whatever needed to come out of that to happen.” Hardly a lament - “it has a ‘fuck it’ energy” - ‘Paris’ draws on a relationship Joy had with a woman and the grieving when it ended; not for that person, but for her short-lived freedom to be “outwardly gay”. It features one of her most stunning verses: “Kinda wanted you to be my girlfriend / Didn’t wanna fuck with no more Catholic guilt / When it comes to pride / I’d raise my heart to a girl or guy”, she recites, in the same hushed tones as earlier. “And then it goes “But I believed I was a sinner”, and I have church-sounding vocals in that part. When I played it to my friend, she gasped. I was like, ‘fuck, yeah, maybe that bit is kind of crazy’.”

Irish Catholic on her dad’s side, Bangladeshi Muslim on her mum’s, Joy wasn’t raised strictly either, but her dad felt she should understand the Catholic church from a young age. “Sure. Okay!” she laughs, flippantly. “I love the iconography, don’t get me wrong. All that gold? Nuts!” She soon questioned, though, “if gay people are accepted here”.

“You get to about 12 and [wonder] ‘am I a sinner for feeling like that girl in my class is really cute?’ But you have no one to talk to, because you’re in church. There’s this unspoken thing of, ‘if I say something, am I gonna go to hell?’” She pauses. “That was fucking terrifying. The breath of hell down your neck… No child should ever have to deal with that. So, I think me going “didn’t want to fuck with no more Catholic guilt” is extremely powerful. It’s kind of nuts I could get to that point.” Perhaps ironically, it was her dad who introduced her to Van Morrison, a key influence on the song’s vocal style. “[He] is one of my biggest vocal inspirations, ‘cause he does this thing where instead of saying “the lion” he says “the la-da-da-da”, and he just spits. My dad used to say ‘he’s letting go’. I feel like on ‘Paris’, I let go.”

After what sounds like a turbulent spell, Joy seems grounded. She’s seen her therapist this morning, and a session with dance producer Jakwob for potential third album moves is next on the agenda. She has yet to plan the ‘Juniper’ tour, due to hit big stages around the UK in November (including the legendary Brixton Academy, a stone’s throw from the cosy loft where we meet), but she’s brainstorming. “I don’t think I’m gonna build huge sets… what Sault had at All Points East - I haven’t got that white collar crime kind of budget!”, she quips, mischievously. “Sensory overload” is the ambition, though. “Venues all smell of piss and beer, which I kind of love, but [I want] triggers everywhere: visuals, auditory, smell. My ex is a perfumer so I was gonna ask him for help. Juniper smells amazing.” A gorgeous segue that begs the question: why name the album ‘Juniper’?

“It’s such an attractive word to me. I love [the movie] Juno. I love the way ‘Juno’ sounds. When I heard the word ‘Juniper’ I was like ‘what the fuck does this mean?!’ Then I read about the plant itself. It’s native to Ireland, and lots of other places; it can grow anywhere, but it doesn’t need to be watered. It’s like a weed - a beautiful weed that makes gin and nice things. It’s aromatic. They put it in loads of stuff. It’s like a cooler way of saying resilient.”

Joy is the kind of animated soul it’d be possible to chat with for hours - outgoing, warm, thoughtful - but she has to bounce; Jakwob awaits. A fellow Tarantino head, she recalls their most recent conversation. “He said ‘you remind me of the last scene in Kill Bill’, when [The Bride] has her daughter in the car and they’re driving the Pussy Wagon into the distance. He was like, ‘you don’t know where you’re headed, but you’re out the other end’. I think I feel honestly the best I’ve ever felt.”

‘Juniper’ is out now via Insanity.

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