Music review: Joy Crookes is another nuanced newcomer from London

POP/ROCK

Joy Crookes, "Skin" (Insanity)

The London singer-songwriter, 23, knew she was making a statement by naming her debut album "Skin." It's an impassioned statement about her British-Irish-Bangladeshi heritage, a nuanced and candid exploration of her multiracial identity.

Listening to Crookes' soulful, intimate music can feel like intruding on a private conversation or cracking open a diary, placing her alongside introspective British artists like Arlo Parks and Cleo Sol. In the title track, she uses words that she spoke to a suicidal friend over simple piano and strings. Other songs explore her experiences with sexual assault, and speak directly to Britain's Conservative government.

In the last four years, Crookes has released three EPs and several singles, featured in a Beat campaign and landed on the 2020 shortlist for the BRIT Rising Star Award.

On the album, Crookes leans into her Bangladeshi roots, singing the colloquial Bangla phrase "Theek Ache" — translated as "it's OK" — to brush off nightly escapades of drinking and hookups. She also carefully probes her family's experiences as immigrants living in London, notably on the dramatic, soulful "19th floor," named for her grandmother's apartment in public housing building, where Crookes spent much of her childhood.

GENEVA ABDUL, New York Times

The Japanese-American singer-songwriter monumentalizes an artist's self-doubts — the creative impulse versus the editorial knife — in this new single. The track begins as a trudging march with stark, droning synthesizer tones, but Patrick Hyland's production expands into ever-wider spaces with lofty, reverberating guitars. Mitski sings about missteps and rejections at first, but her imagination perseveres: "I start the day lying and end with the truth."

JON PARELES, New York Times