South London Still Carries the Weight

Amy Winehouse died in 2011 and I still haven’t made peace with it. Songs like Love Is a Losing Game and You Know I’m No Good did something specific—they took the experience of falling apart and made it feel architecturally inevitable, like a building that was always going to come down. Her voice sounded as though it had already been through everything twice and was quietly documenting the third pass. Then she was gone, and the gap she left has never quite filled.

Joy Crookes is twenty, from south London, and carries some of that weight without performing it. Her songs—Don’t Let Me Down, Since I Left You, Mother May I Sleep With Danger—move at that same unhurried, bruised pace, uninterested in announcing themselves. She started out with a shady producer and worked through it, which she describes without self-pity: When you go through difficult situations, whether personal or in music, you learn how to handle things. She’s been living alone since she was seventeen. You learn to wipe your own ass and how to conduct yourself in certain situations, she says. I learned that from my family, especially the women in my family and their ability to say no. I’m proud that I can hold my own and be strong and tough when necessary.

I won’t call her the next Amy—that comparison gets applied to every south London woman with a difficult timbre and a way with a melisma, and it’s not fair to anyone involved. What I can say is that Joy Crookes sounds like someone who actually has something to say, and the songs are making the argument without her having to force it.