The last track I hear from Joy Crookes’s new album before our interview is House with a Pool, which is the perfect soundtrack for my arrival at 180 The Strand in London – heading up to members’ club Soho House located on the top floors. We’re spending a heatwave early May afternoon drinking picantes on the rooftop, as others splash around in the pool trying to cool down from the intense 26-degree rays.
Shielding our eyes from the sun, we delve into each others’ approach to creativity, the dogma that keeps us sane, our approach to relationships – a kaleidoscope of topics spoken about with such fervour that a one-hour interview slot turns into a full afternoon of conversation. “I almost hate that I have a membership here, as I feel like the best thing about London is that you’re confronted by reality often,” the 26-year-old says, reclining in her chair. I interject with the lyrics to LDN by Lily Allen. The song is a bittersweet love letter to the capital that, though sung in a heavily-dramatised cockney accent and nearly two decades old, is still an accurate depiction of a city of intense duality: of the haves and the have nots; of the moments of pure joy that you can’t find anywhere else contrasted with real strife and struggle. Joy agrees with Allen’s observations. “Then COVID meant people stopped talking to each other and went into places like [Soho House]. It started to feel a bit like LA”
You’re more likely to bump into Joy in South London. That’ll be why this isn’t the first time we’ve met. I media trained Joy before her first studio album at her publicist’s office in Brixton; I bumped into her in torrential rain at Rally festival in Southwark (“it’s quite an alternative line-up”); and I’d seen her as we both frolicked around Peckham bars such as Jumbi, eclectic Irish pub Skehans and SET – a members’ club with a far less exclusive annual membership of £8, which subsidises art projects and ‘pay what you feel’ local cafes.
Joy was nominated for the BRITs Rising Star award back in 2020 before her debut album Skin peaked at number 5 on the UK charts the following year. Her critically-acclaimed feat introduced British radio stations to her emotive vocals – a voice that, despite only being in her mid-twenties, has a deep, rich and wise timbre of someone who has lived many lives. Joy’s visuals are just as heartfelt, with the videos for 19th Floor and When You Were Mine paying homage to the streets and cultures that raised her: snapshots of Irish dancing, Bangladeshi traditional clothing, high-rise blocks and Brixton markets – her grandmother previously sold biriyani from a trolley she used to push around the area before moving back to Bangladesh. And Feet Don’t Fail Me Now nods to her heritage through traditional Bangladeshi dress, while she rides motorcycles with a crew of bikers attached by Rapunzel-like braids (before Doechii’s lauded performance that utilised a similar style).
So where has one of Britain’s rising stars been for the last four years? “I wasn’t very well,” she says. “I basically had a mental health crisis between albums.” While we are waiting for staff to deliver us some cigarettes to compliment the cocktails, I ask her about some lyrics that hit me particularly hard: “‘Who am I when I’m out of your sight? I want to see how we look apart” on Somebody to You. “It’s such an important question for women trying to define their full adult selves outside of relationships that no longer serve them,” I say. Though the lyrics sound like they could be spoken by someone after a bad romantic break-up (“that’s intentional”, she says) it actually hints at a familial relationship that had broken down in the interim and caused Joy to rethink what her life looks like without her reliance on that relative. In that vacuum, she did a lot of soul searching. “It’s funny you picked that line out of all of the lines on the album, because it’s kind of what the whole thing is about,” she explains.