Joy Crookes: Juniper review – sadness made sublime by streetwise soul and snappy wit | Music

In an overcrowded pop market, the place artists are inspired to keep up a continuing presence and stream of what’s depressingly termed “product”, south London singer-songwriter Pleasure Crookes’s profession has progressed in a curious sequence of suits and begins. After releasing a sequence of EPs, she ended 2019 as a hotly tipped act: appearances on Later … With Jools Holland, nominated for the Brits Rising Star award, positioned excessive within the BBC’s Sound of 2020 ballot, invited to assist Harry Kinds on tour. However the latter was nixed by Covid, and her actual business breakthrough didn’t arrive for practically two years: launched on the tail-end of 2021, her debut album Pores and skin made the Prime 5 and, in Ft Don’t Fail Me Now, spawned a kind of long-tail viral hits that achieves a bizarre omnipresence regardless of barely grazing the Prime 30. She began engaged on a follow-up, then vanished once more. The 4 years that separate her debut from Juniper had been a minimum of partly consumed by a interval when she was “actually sick” and “mentally unstable”.Pleasure Crookes: JuniperIt’s a interval that understandably hangs over the contents of Juniper: “I’m so sick, I’m so drained, I can’t maintain dropping my thoughts,” she sings on opener Courageous; “I’m fairly fucking depressing,” runs the blunt refrain of Arithmetic, ostensibly a breakup tune that appears underpinned by one thing noticeably darker than romantic woe alone. You might argue that Juniper’s introspective tone comes at a price – there’s no room for the sort of sharp, political songs about Brexit, gentrification and immigration that peppered Pores and skin – however Crookes is an impressively snappy lyricist who comes throughout as good, streetwise and gobby whatever the private trauma she’s describing.Furthermore, she rigorously swerves the same old self-help platitudes concerning the sort of subjects Juniper addresses, from co-dependency to intergenerational trauma. Home With a Pool, about abusive relationships, and Carmen, about unattainable magnificence requirements, are all of the extra highly effective for his or her mild strategy and avoidance of sentimentality in favour of wit. The latter dispenses with pat conclusions about the necessity to love your self for who you’re or how everybody is gorgeous in their very own approach, and as a substitute concludes unreconciled, with Crookes nonetheless glowering resentfully at its “peng” titular character: “Why am I working double for simply half of what you bought?”The music is equally an impressively recent and particular person tackle the acquainted. The songs have massive choruses and powerful melodies – sturdy sufficient, within the case of Carmen, that it isn’t overshadowed by its backing monitor borrowing one thing as instantly recognisable because the staccato piano line from Elton John’s Bennie and the Jets. You might broadly categorise their fashion as post-Amy Winehouse retro-soul: electrical pianos and Philadelphia Worldwide strings; heat, live-sounding bass and drums; the odd dusting of distortion on Crookes’s vocals, which slip from smokily highly effective and calmly jazz-inflected to extra conversational, rap-informed cadences.Pleasure Crookes: Excellent Crime – videoIt may simply appear run of the mill, but it surely doesn’t, as a result of it’s filtered by means of an appealingly gauzy lens. Synths, harps and organ shimmer and flutter abstractly across the sound, the aural equal of catching one thing within the nook of your eye. There are liberal purposes of dub reggae-esque echo; every little thing has a barely woozy, late-night high quality. Listening to the thick bassline of Excellent Crime, or Move the Salt, pushed by a incredible drum loop sampled from Serge Gainsbourg’s 1968 single Requiem pour un Con and that includes a quick however explosive visitor verse from Vince Staples, you get the sensation that Crookes has an abiding love for trip-hop in its unique, experimental mid-90s type, earlier than it sank into the realm of blandly inoffensive ceremonial dinner soundtrack. It joins Crookes’s admirably eclectic roll name of influences: you actually don’t get a number of singer-songwriters in 2025 name-checking Black Uhuru, the Pogues and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in interviews.skip previous e-newsletter promotionGet music information, daring critiques and sudden extras. Each style, each period, each weekPrivacy Discover: Newsletters might comprise details about charities, on-line adverts, and content material funded by outdoors events. Should you wouldn’t have an account, we’ll create a visitor account for you on theguardian.com to ship you this text. You possibly can full full registration at any time. For extra details about how we use your information see our Privateness Coverage. We use Google reCaptcha to guard our web site and the Google Privateness Coverage and Phrases of Service apply.after e-newsletter promotionIt missteps as soon as. First Final Dance feels jarringly perky given the atmospheric firm it’s protecting, a state of affairs not a lot helped by its tune, which has a peculiar 80s Euro-pop high quality. However one distracting stumble doesn’t matter a lot given how sturdy the remainder of Juniper is, how clearly it asserts Crookes’s expertise as a vocalist and songwriter. There are some massive names right here – in addition to Staples, Kano turns up on Arithmetic, whereas Sam Fender provides vocals to Anyone to You – however the principle attraction by no means feels overshadowed or crowded out. Crookes has publicly nervous concerning the hole between her second album and her debut: “Is anybody going to recollect me?” she puzzled aloud to at least one interviewer lately. You possibly can perceive why, however Juniper proves definitely worth the wait.This week Alexis listened toMark William Lewis – PetalsPoppily melodic, pushed by brilliant, clear guitar, however off-kilter and in some way ineffably creepy, Petals is the proper advert for the complicated pleasures of the London singer-songwriter’s eponymous, addictive album.