Making your second album is a daunting task, particularly if your first was as successful as Joy Crookes’ was. In 2022, Crookes earned nominations for two BRIT Awards and the Mercury Prize off the success of her debut album, Skin, a rich, considered LP that wrestles with topics ranging from performative activism (“Feet Don’t Fail Me Now”) to the sacrifices of immigrant parents (“19th Floor”) to the artist’s experience reckoning with abuse (“Unlearn You”). Throughout Skin, Crookes uses her smoky voice and a jazz-inflected soul sound to deliver urgent, timely messages, but with her next record, she says she’s focused on “trying to carve out my own sound, full stop.”
On this upcoming project, the 24-year-old South London singer-songwriter is tweaking her writing approach and exploring concepts related to hyper-femininity but is hesitant to give away too many concrete details during these early stages. She’s also playing some of the biggest shows of her career this spring supporting Lizzo, including a gig at the vaunted O2 arena in her hometown. I spoke to Crookes— mid-nail appointment—as she was spending time in Los Angeles working on her next record.
Grant Rindner: Can you tell me about where you are creatively? Are you working on material for a second album?
Joy Crookes: I’m writing my second album as we speak—maybe not in this nail shop [laughs]—because the grind never fucking stops. I’m really interested in limitations and focusing on songwriting. I’m over in L.A. at the moment to meet new people and new collaborators, and it’s been a positive experience in that sense.
GR: When you say “limitations,” are you talking about imposing constraints on yourself to help the process?
JC: Yeah. I’m definitely imposing constraints. I’ve been interested in writing a lot of this album on the bass because bass doesn’t dictate harmonics, so it means that when I work on melodies I have to work a lot harder and I have more room—even though I kind of have less room, if that makes any sense.
GR: For ‘Skin,’ were you mostly writing on piano, on guitar?
JC: Piano, guitar, beats—everything. With ‘Skin,’ anything and everything [that I could] come by, I would use. Whereas with this record, there’s the fear of writing a second album and looking it in the face. The limitations come from imitating when I first started making music, which was in my bedroom as a teenager. I didn’t have very much back then. I had GarageBand; I didn’t even have Logic.
GR: For someone like you—who came up self-producing and selfrecording—when you get to that point where you’re more cemented in the industry and have access to fancy studios, to big producers, it’s very exciting. But it can sometimes feel like it gets you away from the heart of what you do.
JC: One hundred percent, and that’s why I went away from it. It’s so easy to fall into those traps and fall into, ‘Oh, well this producer and that producer want to work with me,’ and people blowing smoke up your ass. If anything, it’s like—I created a border patrol around my ass to stop people from blowing smoke up it.
GR: ‘Skin’ contained some music you’d been working on since you were a teenager. Was everything on the new LP written post-‘Skin’ ?
JC: Yes. I just think my new shit is better [laughs]. I’ve obviously learned skills and become a better songwriter in all of these processes, but my instinct says that it’s better stuff than the music I was making before.
GR: What do you think is the biggest way you’ve changed as a songwriter from when you were making the first record to now?
JC: I don’t need things to be polished to know if they’re good. I don’t need things to be wrapped up in ribbon and nicely packaged for me to know it’s a good song, and I take a lot of ownership of that now. I’m like, ‘Okay cool, guys—let’s not throw fucking roses at it. Let’s just make sure it sounds good when it’s shit so that it’ll sound amazing when it’s produced.’ Separating the production process from the writing process and doing that intentionally is something that I definitely learned in this round of writing. I’ve also learned in this round that it’s okay to be shit for a while. The shit songs are a huge part of finding the good ones.
BLAZER, TOP & PANTS Robert Wun, RINGS Crookes’ Own
GR: Do you find that being out in L.A. and working on a lot of this record stateside has had any bearing thematically on what you’re talking about?
JC: I’d love for L.A. to be able to affect my songwriting in the sense that there is history here, there is depth here. Kendrick Lamar comes from L.A. But A) It’s not necessarily my experience and B) I can find the city quite rootless sometimes. That can have a negative impact on my writing. But it’s funny because one of the first songs that I wrote for this record I wrote in L.A., and it kinda sparked the whole record, so I don’t know.
I don’t think that the environment of L.A. necessarily inspires anything apart from being in the sunshine, and maybe I’ll write happier songs because I’m in the sunshine. For me, it’s more about what headspace I’m in, what I’m interested in at the time, what’s going on in my brain, and what I’m deeply thinking about—and maybe what I’ve not been thinking about—that affects my writing.
It doesn’t matter where I am in the world—if there’s something that needs to come out, then it needs to come out. With “Feet Don’t Fail Me Now,” the Black Lives Matter movement was happening all over the world, and I wrote the lyrics of that song over a period of months. I would argue that maybe I would have written it before if I [had been] in L.A. because of what an uproar of a time it was here, but I was in London. I’m British and write from a British perspective.
GR: I was thinking about that song. Its narrator isn’t meant to be literally you; it’s a character. I think, in a lot of ways, the present cultural moment is incredibly literal—you see it all the time online, in how people react to things, in the conversations people have about art. Do you ever worry that your music is going to be misunderstood in that way?
JC: I did worry about that. I also love the irony that there are loads of people that don’t get what the song’s about. It ingrains the point of the song even more: People aren’t listening, people aren’t tapping in. People are actively tapping out. I think with songs, it’s like, as much as I’d love for people to get what I’m talking about, art is subjective and people are going to take what they want. That’s probably one of the most powerful things about art.
TOP Rosie Assoulin, PANTS A.L.C.
GR: Much of the critical attention on your music has focused on your timeless, soulful throwback voice, but lyrically, you talk about issues that are very much contemporary. Are you doing that in hopes that certain older listeners will discover your music and be more receptive to your messaging?
JC: Yeah, that’s definitely a thought process, but I think that’s less so on this next record. It doesn’t follow the same format. I’m trying to carve out my own sound, full stop, as opposed to [performing] a trick where it’s a bit old-school but I’m talking about new-school shit. There’s 100 percent always a part of my work that speaks about things that are difficult. It’s actually how I started in music. The reason why I [started writing] songs was because there were so many things I couldn’t have conversations with my family or friends about, so instead of trying, I just packaged it into a song.
GR: In this phase of the writing and ideation, is there anything nonmusical that’s been a creative catalyst for you?
JC: I’m really interested in hyper-femininity. Sometimes in my life, I have overcompensated by dressing more masculine when feeling powerless. I had a whole period where I just wore trousers and I called it my “French liberation period.” I’m really interested in how a woman can be liberated through femininity. I’ve been contemplating how, throughout history, we gravitate to powerful women for their fashion sense, like Frida Kahlo, Josephine Baker, Twiggy, Audrey Hepburn.
But actually, it’s deeper than that. There is power there, but it’s a power that, in the world we live in, is massively overlooked and minimized to, Oh, it’s just fashion. No, there’s something stronger and more powerful there, something liberating and shameless. I’m 24. I think it’s safe to say I’m a woman now, and I’m interested in taking some ownership in being a woman. In terms of music, a lot of my favorite artists are men. A lot of men sell more merch than women.
Men are, in a lot of instances, more successful than women. I don’t want to sit and cry, but we know how society works. I often find that in music, even within the following I have, men are still more respected than me, and I feel like I have to demand more respect. But I’m in this process of going, fuck it, one thing I have is power in my femininity, even if that’s been something I’ve shied away from or been embarrassed about. Now it’s about shedding that shame and going face-to-face with womanhood. ❤
BLAZER Vintage, TOP A.L.C., PANTS Cult Gaia, SHOES Sonia Rykiel, EARRINGS Machete, RINGS & BRACELET Crookes’ Own
STORY CREDITS
PHOTOGRAPHY Kat Slootsky, STYLIST Emma Sousa, HAIR Florido Basallo, MAKEUP Samuel Paul, PHOTO ASSISTANT Alex Justice, PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Skyler Baxter
HERO IMAGE CREDITS
BLAZER Acne Studios, PANTS A.L.C.
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