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.
