Joy Crookes knows a thing or two about music.
As a kid, her dad encouraged her to soak up the classics, from Nick Cave and King Tubby to The Pogues and hours of music from Pakistan.
“He’d say, ‘This is from your ends of the world, you should hear this’,” says the singer, who’s of Irish-Bangladeshi heritage.
Before long, she’d bought her first album (Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On) and uploaded her first cover to YouTube, playing a cheap guitar she bought in Argos.
Her debut album, Skin, was released in 2021, earning a Mercury Prize nomination for its soulful, perceptive ballads. The following summer, Crookes played Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage for the first time, bursting into tears at the scale of the occasion.
But as a music nerd, who’d devoured back issues of NME magazine as a teenager, she knew what came next: The second album slump.
Except… it never came.
“People think the scary part of your second album is the writing,” she says. “Like, ‘Oh no, what am I going to say?'”
“For me, I’ve always got something to [expletive] say, so it wasn’t that difficult to write.
