Rediscovering Joy: How Joy Crookes made her return with resilient new album ‘Juniper’

Joy Crookes is fired up. Pounding the pavements of her south London neighbourhood, an unusually moody June sky looms over the singer when she arrives on Zoom 20 minutes later than our scheduled interview time. “I am so sorry,” she says, visibly rattled. “Basically, an absolute fucking madness happened at the nail shop.” Amid breathless strides while attempting to roll a cigarette on the go, she recounts how a verbal scuffle broke out in the salon which escalated to the point where she was caught in the crossfire of nail products. “I was like, ‘This is gonna fucking sound made-up when I get on the phone and apologise!’” 

Despite her less-than-zen start to the morning, this is exactly how I would expect Crookes to pick up the phone: out and about in the chaos of the capital city that has always been a larger-than-life character in her soulful contemplations on love, identity and politics told through the prism of her inner-city upbringing. She sang about the strange comfort of anonymity on ‘London Mine’, celebrated immigrant communities on ‘19th Floor’ and paid tribute to a Brixton-born love story on ‘When You Were Mine’. When she released her debut album Skin in the autumn of 2021, London was the pulse that gave the record its cosmopolitan vibrancy. 

It established the singer-songwriter as one of the most exciting new British artists of her generation. She was nominated for the BRITs’ Rising Star Award in 2020 — which had previously gone to the likes of Adele, Jorja Smith and Sam Fender — and was placed fourth in the BBC’s Sound of 2020. Two years later, she was nominated for Album of the Year at the Mercury Prize, while her wise-beyond-her-years perspective and raw vocal timbre earnt her comparisons to music icons like Amy Winehouse and Lauryn Hill. 

On paper, her flourishing career only pointed to an upward trajectory. Yet, it’s taken four years for the 26-year-old to reach a place where she feels ready to release her second album, Juniper. Did she intend for such a pronounced gap between records? “I didn’t,” she replies. “I was quite unwell during that process, and I don’t think it would have been safe for me to release music. I really needed to sort my mental health out, and I was in a bad way.” While she started writing the new album back in 2022, only now have her personal and professional lives come back into alignment. “I’m really good now,” she assures me before sweetly wishing a passerby she seems to know a lovely day. 

Juniper is the evolution of everything that made Crookes special in the first place: urgent commotions of layered instrumentation, heartfelt soul-pop lyricism with sprinkles of dry wit (“I shine and you get sunburn / That sounds like a you problem”, goes a particularly satisfying jibe on ‘Pass the Salt’) and her timeless, bluesy vocals that powerfully intertwine the personal with the political. The record takes listeners on an emotionally chronological journey of events between both albums as she tries to make sense of the relationships in her life, from reckoning with emotional barriers (‘Brave’) and embracing her sexuality (‘Paris’), to acknowledging generational trauma (‘Mother’) and calling out bad players in the music industry (‘I Know You’d Kill’).  

Dipping her pen back into a melting pot of R&B, neo-soul and jazz to create some of her most sumptuous hooks yet, the Crookes that you hear on these recordings was still very much “in the trenches”; she sounds older, wiser and incredibly fragile at points. “I don’t know how far I can go into it,” she begins cautiously, redirecting her soft gaze back into the camera, “but when waking up feels like a chore, you’re in a fucking bad place.” Throughout that time, music became more than just an outlet for Crookes; it was her “saviour”. “It was just the best part of being unwell,” she quips with a mirthless laugh. 

Despite her gratitude for being healthy and back doing what she loves, that doesn’t mitigate the anxiety she’s feeling about her return. “I’ve really dealt with strong feelings of, ‘Fuck, is anyone gonna remember me?’” she admits. She says she bonded with Wolf Alice frontwoman Ellie Rowsell over the same concerns in a smoking area at the start of 2025, who also has a new album coming out after four years. “I was like, ‘Ellie, what are you on about? You’re fucking brilliant!’ But actually, at the same time, I was like, ‘I know exactly what you mean.’” She elaborates: “I’m really happy and excited, but also, it’s not my first album. I’m not a new artist. I don’t have that fun freshness about me — I’ve been around.” 

Crookes has been trying to put those feelings to one side and channel more of the unadulterated passion that got her here in the first place. Growing up in Elephant and Castle, she didn’t discover her powerful voice until she started teaching herself guitar, after which songwriting felt like a natural progression. “I really love the art of songwriting when it comes to storytelling, and how the two coincide,” she says. “I don’t think I had an ‘I’m a musician’ moment, but I just knew that I had this thing that made me feel really good.” In 2013, she uploaded a cover of Ray Charles’s ‘Hit the Road Jack’ to YouTube which caught the attention of a management team. By 19, she had signed a record label with Sony Music imprint Speakerbox. 

The music in her household growing up ranged from Nick Cave and Gregory Isaacs to The Pogues and Sinéad O’Connor, while she soaked up the wider cultural influences of her Irish father and Bangladeshi mother. She’s paid tribute to her mum’s heritage by wearing traditional Bangladeshi dress on red carpets and in her music videos, while her dad’s lineage brought her into the world of competitive Irish dancing for 14 years, which she showcased in the affecting music video for ‘19th Floor’. “Other people don’t understand that identity is extremely complex,” she says, now planted back home on her sofa. “Identity is never down just to your race. It’s never down just to your sexuality. It’s multifaceted.” 

Indeed, she’s expressed some frustration in past interviews over what she perceived as a hyper-focus on her ethnicity as a means to categorise her. “I don’t have any issue with that anymore,” she clarifies. “I’m not interested in making sure everyone understands me. I’m quite happy for people to take what they will and interpret how they will and not have so much control over that.” 

This feels like a good opportunity to tell Crookes that we share a lot of similarities. I am also South Asian on my mother’s side, Irish through my dad, and, coincidentally, a former Irish dancer. At this moment, she thinks she’s spotted one key difference in the shape of a rival football team scarf (she’s a lifelong Arsenal supporter) bordering my camera frame, which I correctly identify as a wall of sashes from my competition days. “I’m fucking screaming! Show me right now,” Crookes demands, sparking a niche side tangent for several minutes, during which she lilts her favourite jig tune for me.

Crookes is delightfully unguarded and beams with the kind of confidence that is only earnt when you give up on the pursuit of trying to control how you’re perceived. “I think with album one, you’re just so desperate for people to understand you and your complexity,” she says. “And actually, with this, I’m kind of like ‘whatever’, in the best way. That means I’m actually probably more comfortable with who I am.” 

She explains that the “catalyst” for her protracted mental health struggles was entering a new relationship in 2023, which opened the emotional floodgates. “The act of falling in love is so vulnerable that it can bring out a lot of shite,” she shares. “So a lot of stuff came up to the surface. And then, before I’d entered the relationship, I was experiencing quite severe mental health symptoms and signs that something was not headed for the up, for lack of better words.” 

The album title Juniper — a reference to the “resilient” evergreen conifer “that can grow anywhere” — is a reflection of everything Crookes has been through. When she recorded opening track ‘Brave’, a moody confessional that embodies the soulful heaviness of Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’, it immediately jumped out as the entry to the new record. “I’m so sick / I’m so tired / I can’t keep losing my mind / I wanna be brave / I wanna be in love,” she pleads over a swelling classical string arrangement. The cinematic composition belonged to Loyle Carner before it found its way to Crookes through her producer Blue May. “I bawled and bawled crying,” she remembers of hearing it for the first time. 

She also secured guest features from West Coast rapper Vince Staples (‘Pass the Salt’) and British grime giant Kano (‘Mathematics’). The latter visited Crookes in the studio before he sent her his surprise verse. “Kano’s a really stoic man,” she remembers of the Top Boy star’s reaction to the new material. “And then he did this weird thing which was really poignant, where he was walking out and he stopped in the middle of the studio and turned around to me, and he was like, ‘That is real progress. It’s gonna be really good. You’ve smashed it.’ And it wasn’t arse-licky. It was constructive and clear and kind, and I’ll never forget it.” 

She also got the seal of approval from Elton John for the catty and complicated ‘Carmen’, after unintentionally channelling ‘Bennie and the Jets’. “We felt it was only fair to honour him, and he was super supportive about it, and really loves the song,” she shares of the music legend, who is subsequently credited as a writer on the track. As I attempt to unpack the messiness of that song, touching on how the racial inequality of societal beauty standards can simultaneously be tangled up with internalised misogyny, Crookes simplifies it: “It’s gnarly.” 

“I want to be wanted like Carmen,” she admits over a surly beat, a song inspired by a real-life acquaintance who’s illustrated in the music video by a stylish blonde. Propping her phone up to roll another cigarette at her back door, she explains, “It was like, ‘Are we gonna do this like, “Fuck you, bitch!”, or actually, “I don’t rate you, but I’m gonna write this song from an adoration point of view because actually, this isn’t about me and you. This is about something much larger than both of us.”’”  

Not one track on the album can be characterised by its exterior. Even the Kylie Minogue-inspired disco beats of ‘First Last Dance’ conceal something more sinister. “[It’s] about vomiting attacks when you are anxious,” Crookes says matter-of-factly. ‘I Know You’d Kill’, meanwhile, is about a “fucking weirdo” on the peripheries of her team who she discovered had “extremely weird intentions with me”, and her manager’s quick reflexes. 

Crookes has clearly undergone a drastic perspective shift over the past few years; she explains that her priorities now are simply to refine her craft — including trusting in her skills as a producer in a male-dominated field — to achieve a sense of longevity and be a good, moral person. “I really believe that it’s important for artists to take a position to speak in times where the world is a very problematic place, to be a sign of the times. And I will continue doing that,” she affirms. 

More than anything, though, she’s going easy on herself. “I don’t want to beat myself up for [the new album] taking so long. I’m so happy that I’m here. There’s a world where I couldn’t have been here, and I am.

I feel so grateful for that,” she says.

“Regardless of how people receive the music, I know I can always go back to Juniper and be like, ‘This was the order of events in my life at that time, and I survived it.’”