Joy Crookes: Juniper review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

18 septembre 2025 à 13:54

(Insanity)
Four years ago, the south Londoner’s star was on the rise with her debut Skin – then she vanished. Now, she’s back with shimmering sounds and cleverly unsentimental lyrics, plus explosive cameos by Vince Staples and Kano

In an overcrowded pop market, where artists are encouraged to maintain a constant presence and stream of what’s depressingly termed “product”, south London singer-songwriter Joy Crookes’s career has progressed in a curious series of fits and starts. After releasing a series of EPs, she ended 2019 as a hotly tipped act: appearances on Later … With Jools Holland, nominated for the Brits Rising Star award, placed high in the BBC’s Sound of 2020 poll, invited to support Harry Styles on tour. But the latter was nixed by Covid, and her real commercial breakthrough didn’t arrive for nearly two years: released at the tail-end of 2021, her debut album Skin made the Top 5 and, in Feet Don’t Fail Me Now, spawned one of those long-tail viral hits that achieves a weird omnipresence despite barely grazing the Top 30. She started working on a follow-up, then vanished again. The four years that separate her debut from Juniper were at least partly consumed by a period when she was “really sick” and “mentally unstable”.

It’s a period that understandably hangs over the contents of Juniper: “I’m so sick, I’m so tired, I can’t keep losing my mind,” she sings on opener Brave; “I’m pretty fucking miserable,” runs the blunt chorus of Mathematics, ostensibly a breakup song that seems underpinned by something noticeably darker than romantic woe alone. You could argue that Juniper’s introspective tone comes at a cost – there’s no room for the kind of sharp, political songs about Brexit, gentrification and immigration that peppered Skin – but Crookes is an impressively snappy lyricist who comes across as smart, streetwise and gobby regardless of the personal trauma she’s describing.

‘The epitome of amazingness’: how electroclash brought glamour, filth and fun back to 00s music

The Guardian

Par :Alexis Petridis

17 septembre 2025 à 06:00

Witty, foul-mouthed, camp and punky, it was the 00s answer to slick superclubs and the rock patriarchy. As its rough, raw sound returns, the scene’s eyeliner-ed heroes, from Peaches to Jonny Slut, relive its excesses

Jonny Melton knew that his club night Nag Nag Nag had reached some kind of tipping point when he peered out of the DJ booth and spotted Cilla Black on the dancefloor. “I think that’s the only time I got really excited,” he laughs. “I was playing the Tobi Neumann remix of Khia’s My Neck, My Back, too – ‘my neck, my back, lick my pussy and my crack’ – and there was Cilla, grooving on down. You know, it’s not Bobby Gillespie or Gwen Stefani, it’s fucking Cilla Black. I’ve got no idea how she ended up there, but I’ve heard since that she was apparently a bit of a party animal.”

It seems fair to say that a visit from Our Cilla was not what Melton expected when he started Nag Nag Nag in London in 2002. A former member of 80s goth band Specimen who DJed under the name Jonny Slut, he’d been inspired by a fresh wave of electronic music synchronously appearing in different locations around the world. Germany had feminist collective Chicks on Speed and DJ Hell with his groundbreaking label International DeeJay Gigolos. France produced Miss Kittin and The Hacker, Vitalic and Electrosexual. Britain spawned icy electro-pop quartet Ladytron and noisy, sex-obsessed trio Add N To (X). Canada spawned Tiga and Merrill Nisker, who abandoned the alt-rock sound of her debut album Fancypants Hoodlum and, with the aid of a Roland MC-505 “groovebox”, reinvented herself as Peaches. New York had performance art inspired duo Fischerspooner and a collection of artists centred around DJ and producer Larry Tee, who gave the sound a name: electroclash.

Ed Sheeran: Play review – subcontinental sounds and shards of darkness – but still unmistakably him

The Guardian

Par :Alexis Petridis

12 septembre 2025 à 01:00

(Gingerbread Man/Atlantic)
Despite embracing Indian and Persian sounds, Sheeran’s eighth album goes back to basics after two records of muted melancholy – albeit with some surprising undercurrents

As he points out on the opening track of Play, Ed Sheeran has now been around a long time. It’s 20 years since he self-released his debut album and 14 since he signed to a major label and set about becoming the most commercially successful British artist of his age: long enough that we’re now seeing the appearance of pop stars who claim him as a formative influence. (Singer-songwriter Myles Smith, who was just into his teens when Sheeran released his breakthrough album +, even plays one of those little acoustic guitars that have long been Sheeran’s trademark.) It’s certainly long enough that anyone with even a passing interest knows what to expect when Ed Sheeran releases a new album.

Sheeran’s success is based on a certain dependability: it doesn’t seem to matter who he works with – Pharrell Williams, Eric Clapton, Eminem, the National’s Aaron Dessner – the results always somehow sound exactly like Ed Sheeran. Whether you see that as evidence of a melodic signature so strong it rings out regardless of the musical setting or a failure of artistic imagination depends on whether you’re among those who contributed to his cumulative sales figures of 200m, or part of the vociferous cadre who view him as the embodiment of all that’s wrong with music. The latter camp gets a shout-out on Play’s prosaically titled opening track Opening, essentially an older, more battered counterpart to You Need Me, I Don’t Need You, the 2011 track that bullishly asserted his bona fides: “Not the pop star they say they prefer,” Sheeran raps.

Vue lecture