Joy Crookes: “I sing about what I will put up with and stand for – and I quite clearly show what I will not stand for"

Joy Crookes is meditating over the meaning of ‘juniper’. She uses the title of her new album like an adjective, anointing the satin syllables in her soft responses.

The word came to her about four years ago, just after making her debut album Skin, a staggering curtain rise for the singer-songwriter that broke into the UK top five. Juniper, an evergreen plant that can withstand even the most extreme conditions, offered Crookes a kind of talisman, and inspired the first stab at her second album.

“I wrote the song, ‘Juniper’, after finding out about that plant. It actually didn’t make it onto the album, because it didn’t feel right,” the London singer tells me. “But what I didn’t realise is that it was a prophecy for what my life was about to look like. I wasn’t quite in my juniper phase yet. But after that, I entered a very dark, introspective time in my life.

“There were a lot of things going on at that time. I guess my frontal lobe developed, and so lots of shite that was at the bottom of the pan boiled up to the top. I had been through an abusive relationship, and I had a really hedonistic time in my early twenties, getting too fucked up at times. But I also had loads of fun. So it was a mixture of all the emotions – some really severe, some extremely high and fun. And that made the perfect weathering for my second album.”

The creation of Juniper seemed to offer Crookes the needed respite from the past few years. This isn’t simply an album Crookes wanted to make – it’s one she needed to make.

“Music is a compulsion and I feel I have to make it,” she ponders. “There’s no reality of the world where I’m not making music. It encourages me to be an objective observer of life, and provides a way of judging what I want to carry forward or keep in the past.

“There was pressure in many different forms to make this album, but it was mainly from myself. There wasn’t clear-cut pressure from anyone around me. But unfortunately the world we live in is so saturated, and things move in such a violently fast way, that I felt really concerned about becoming irrelevant, or that people weren’t going to give a fuck anymore. Which is probably not the best thing to say out loud, but every artist is lying if they don’t think that.”

Juniper was largely crafted in a studio on a farm outside of Cheltenham, where Crookes reunited with her long-time collaborator Barney Lister. The rural environs seemed to provide Crookes with the space she needed to explore the sounds, turns and phrases the record demanded.

“Barney and I were in a real groove and playing loads of bass,” says Crookes. “I was quite obsessed with the idea of writing lyrics to basslines, and creating limitations by using an instrument that generally provided notes, not chords.

“I had to work a bit harder harmonically, because I wasn’t used to the bass as an instrument,” she adds. “Barry and I stayed in the countryside for about a month. People like Johnny Latimer and Matt Maltese dropped by, and we’d write all day, then go to the pub in the evening. We all had the time of our lives.”

Juniper is unlike Crookes’ previous work. It’s more capricious in its subject matter, leaving room for broader implications in the margins of her personal journey. Track three, ‘Carmen’, is a case in point. The song offers a cutting critique of Eurocentric beauty standards, but down to the bare bones, ‘Carmen’ explores Crookes’ own envy and adoration.

“For a lot of women, particularly women who don’t come from this societal standard of beauty, it doesn’t matter how beautiful they are, it’s not how society runs,” Crookes says. “So the song offered this kind of double meaning. It’s about feeling unworthy and wanting to have the attention you see people garner from very little. It’s an interesting one, because ‘Carmen’ is not an envious, ‘fuck her’ song. It’s more adoring and yearning. As opposed to shooting down the messenger, it’s more of a comment on patriarchy and men’s adoration for this specific type of woman.”

For Crookes, the personal can be universal, turning her carefully excavated, emotional songs into a kind of protest.

“I sing about what I will put up with and stand for – and I quite clearly show what I will not stand for,” she continues. “That spans from the micro and my personal life, but also in the macro sense. I think Skin and Juniper are a good example, because in Skin, there’s this larger essence of what I won’t put up with: the Tories, the adoption of cancel culture and a general fear of silencing. But then there’s themes of sexual abuse on Skin and really dark, personal politics going on.”

“Then on Juniper, there’s more humour and a ‘nah, fuck that’ mentality. The subjects might seem smaller, as they’re more interpersonal. However, I think those more personal issues are in congress with larger political issues, such as the standard of beauty, sexuality, Catholic guilt and patriarchy.

“On ‘Brave’, there’s a lyric that goes ‘Can a mother’s hold change a baby’s fate?’, which explores nature versus nurture, but you could also apply that to the situation in Gaza right now. So Juniper is a bit less in your face. It feels more accessible as it starts on a personal level, and then you can take those lessons onto a larger, political scale.”

This November, Joy Crookes will bring the verdant lushness of Juniper to these shores for a performance at 3Olympia Theatre. Growing up with an Irish father, she’s no stranger to the country, and spent a good bit of her childhood in Cabra on the North side of Dublin. Aside from her nostalgic adoration for Ireland, there’s one thing she can’t get behind.

“I think chicken fillet rolls are disgusting!” she deadpans. “Although I love Manhattan cheese popcorn. But seriously, I love Ireland and I’ve always felt Irish. Growing up, it was like I had three homes: London, Bangladesh and Ireland. I feel blessed every time I go to Dublin.”

“My dad is very Irish, and he didn’t sugarcoat the Irish experience, or become English when he moved to England in the ‘80s – and that was not an easy time to do so as an Irish person. But he had a choice about whether to uphold his Irish values, culture and traditions. I think it was a hard one for him, because how do you keep your own culture when you have a child with another culture?

“But childhood is really about growing up with multiple cultures in tandem with one another. That’s what my dad did. And I guess I felt very stable in my Irishness, because there was this whole fucking Irish man standing there, telling me ‘XYZ’.”

Irish music was important to Crookes’ father, raising her on the likes of Sinéad O’Connor, The Pogues, Van Morrison and a horde of others.

“I also love Bricknasty and Aby Coulibaly at the moment,” she says. “Lankum are like the best thing to come out of Ireland in the last 20 years. ‘Oro Sé Do Bheatha’ Bhaile’ by Sinéad is one of my favourite songs ever, it’s a real fucked up reggae version. I love it, but trying to explain or play that song to anyone in my life is very fucking confusing. Van’s version of ‘Raglan Road’ is also one of my favourites. I want it played at my funeral.”

• Juniper is out now. Joy Crookes plays the 3Olympia, Dublin on November 3.