Joy Crookes dealt with toxic relationships and a Harry Styles tour that never happened. Now, she’s poised to finally get her moment

Joy Crookes wrote her new single, “Painkiller”, in 2022, not long after breaking it off with someone she’d been dating: “A genuinely nasty person,” she reflects. “Yeah, it was pure f***ery and it got nasty before I became aware of what was happening.” She pauses. “I looked like a shell by the end of it… it completely ruined me, for a bit. But I’m good now.” Writing “Painkiller” was one way of processing how she ended up there: “I think it’s really easy to blame yourself in situations like that, and that’s what the song explores,” she says. “It very specifically asks myself why I allowed someone who was frankly abusive to be loved by me.”

This kind of candour is par for the course from Crookes. She shot to mainstream attention around 2021 with the swaying, sultry “Feet Don’t Fail Me Now”, the lead single from her Mercury Prize-shortlisted debut, Skin. It’s a sharp, witty riposte to empty online activism – “retweeting picket signs/ Put my name on petitions, but I won’t change my mind/ I’m keeping up appearances” – that also explores the compulsion to stay silent out of fear of public backlash. And yes, it’s only grown more pertinent by the day.

Crookes and I first met back in July, right in the middle of her wild hot summer, when she was making her debut at Montreux Jazz Festival and in between work on her to-be-announced third album. It was a major career milestone for an artist who grew up idolising the legends who’ve graced its stages, from Nina Simone to Marvin Gaye. “There was really something about this summer,” Crookes says wistfully. We’re now well into September and speaking over video call – she’s at her house in Deptford, south London – and the 27-year-old is in mourning, a tiny bit, for the whirlwind few months she’s had. “I really doused myself in the fun and didn’t overthink too much. I felt very playful, and connected to my friends, and spent all this time listening to music, going to gigs, just doing simple things that my heart enjoys,” she reflects. “I’m sad that it’s over.”

Raised in Elephant and Castle with her three siblings by a Bangladeshi mother and Irish father, Crookes’s music is indicative of her melting pot of influences – the Pakistani songs, US rap and Jamaican reggae her father played during car journeys. It melds pop, dub, ska, jazz and hip-hop in with her core soul revival sound. She’s had plenty of successes and should get due credit for spearheading an ongoing UK soul revival, alongside artists like RAYE and Olivia Dean. Yet her career to date has been strangely stop-and-start. It wasn’t helped at all by the pandemic, which kicked in just after a Jools Holland performance, a spot on the BBC Sound of 2020 poll and a Brit Awards Rising Star nomination. A gig supporting Harry Styles on tour fell through, too, when live music was shuttered by lockdowns.

And there was the toxic relationship she mentioned, which seemed to inform much of her second album, last year’s Juniper – altogether bolder, darker and more vulnerable than its predecessor – along with a mental health crisis she suffered in 2022. On “Mathematics”, featuring grime star Kano, she sings in a forlorn, smokey croon, “All that’s left is your T-shirt/ You’re a bruise and it still hurts.” The torch song “Forever” is exquisite: “Heartbreak consistent like British weather/ But I don’t let you go.”

“I felt shame, a lot of shame, after that ended,” she tells me. “I think a lot of people that end up in abusive relationships of different types, the natural course is to feel a massive amount of guilt. I think in order to manage that I was going out a lot. I needed that hedonism.” She got tattoos at house parties; she and her mates got plastered in Wagamamas (“pathetic… but also hilarious,” she jokes.) She’s done a lot of work to get to where she is now. “There was a chance I wouldn’t have been here for my second album, so that had to be a priority – getting better and being in a fit state,” she says. “Honestly I could cry at how happy I feel, at how much healing has been done. It feels incredible.”

Making the video for “Painkiller” sounds like a cathartic experience in itself. They cast Crookes’s bad boy love interest – played by Matt Whipps – after the producer, Danny Herman, spotted him working in a coffee shop in Chicago. Crookes wanted it to look like her character was playing her own part in the relationship’s toxicity, rather than pinning it all on the boyfriend. “I think the over-simplification of relationships through therapy-speak is affecting the way we navigate things,” she suggests. “It’s like, we read bell hooks once and now we’re applying her to every situation. It’s really flawed, and we end up pathologising everything rather than really feeling it.”

She had to check herself, recently, while talking to a friend about her relationship, as she found herself reaching instinctively for generic platitudes. Much of the terminology around modern dating “doesn’t quite cut it when people have their own histories and traumas”, she says. “Falling in love with someone is one of the most vulnerable things a person can do, and in heterosexual relationships, I do feel like men also suffer from the patriarchy in their own ways. It’s very easy to hate on men.”

These conversations with friends have been informing some of the songs on her third album, which she’s working on with her close friend and collaborator Harvey Grant, a classically trained musician, producer and songwriter who looks “like a cross between Jack Black and Matt Berry”. They’ll start the day playing billiards at their local in Deptford, or rummaging around The Shop, a store that flogs everything from old Nokia phones to state-of-the-art synthesisers.

“This is just like a whole different ball game for me,” Crookes says of the album process, grinning. “It’s like being a kid again – the studio feels like a playground.” She’s a lot happier now she’s not being shunted off to LA to sit in studios with strangers while she spills her guts. “My heart is so deeply in the creative process, I’m almost treating the studio like a place of worship, keeping it sacred.”

It’s helping her songwriting, too, from a “pansexual anthem” called “Chop Chop Honey” – which she debuted at Montreux – about an imaginary world where “you can shag anywhere”, with music influenced by her Bangladeshi heritage. Another song was inspired by a viral comment about the proliferation of white blokes with podcasts – TikTok users urged them to “go back to the garage and play guitar”.

“But it’s also about the fact that you can unravel to people you don’t know,” she explains. She frequently finds herself chatting to strangers around Deptford, in the cafe at her gym, in smoking areas at clubs. “I think it’s really strange sometimes how, even if there isn’t a god, there’s an energy that can make two people be in the same place at the same time,” she says. Her dad introduced her to Catholicism – she sings about “Catholic guilt” on Juniper closer “Paris”, about exploring her sexuality with another woman – but always told her it was about understanding her heritage. “He was like, ‘I don’t give a f*** if you think Jesus is real,’” she says with a smile.

She’s been having a personal reckoning lately, at a time when more and more young people are identifying as spiritual. “The way technology and social media are, it’s like we’re reaching for something else because we’re f***ing sick of it,” she says. “But I’m Irish Bangladeshi, and magic exists in both cultures hugely – folklore, myths and fairytales.”

There’s plenty in life that doesn’t make sense, she believes, but sometimes we’re just better off not knowing. “The people trying to make us know everything are ruining s*** and making the planet worse,” she says. “Accepting that we can’t know everything makes us better people.”

‘Painkiller’, the new single from Joy Crookes, is out now