EP Review: Crush! by Essosa
Essosa’s third EP pairs Janet-era keyboards with modern drums and writes love songs for people on borrowed time.
At 14, Joy Aiseosa Bakare started making beats. Structured notes on option periods, how album deals get built, contract language. She grew up between Toronto and Essex, played piano from three, wrote songs from eight. Her parents played gospel and jazz in the house. She studied pharmacy at University College London and music engineering on the side, and when she needed money for her first music video (“Lemonade,” off the 2021 EP Dreamworld), her flatmates watched her eat nothing but crackers for two or three months while she worked late pub shifts to cover the shoot. She graduated with her pharmacy degree, had a job offer in hand, and chose music instead. “I came into the industry with a very, very, very strong sense of self that a lot of new artists don’t have,” Essosa has said. “I was already an adult and I’d already been making beats, making music, and writing music.”
Crush!, her third EP, found its sound early. The first song she and producer jkarri wrote together was “Missing U,” and it set the template: “We knew we wanted a 90s synth with 2026 drums.” That ratio held for every session that followed. The keyboards recall Janet Jackson’s mid-90s singles—one press outlet noted the resemblance between “Missing U” and “Together Again”—and the drums tick at the clipped, slightly jumpy pace jkarri brings to his production for PinkPantheress and Nia Archives (it sounds like a 1996 slow jam that someone rebooted with double-time hi-hats and forgot to tell the synths). “Missing U” does something different than the rest. Essosa had left someone, knew it was the right call, and still pictured him with another woman and wanted to swallow her pride (“I wanna put my pride aside/But I can’t handle it tonight”). The second verse talks about going outside, finding courage to explain.
The middle stretches with “Favourite Liar,” which tells someone to leave his ego at the door and vows to change his life. Those are poses. They could belong to any R&B single released this spring. But production-wise, it bounces with a late-90s Neptunes energy, record scratches and handclaps over a slinky chord progression, and “Signs” rides quicker percussion with a hook built for a car window down. But the lyrics fall back on stock R&B (“You know that you’re mine/You always come right on time/I’m seeing the signs”).
The EP tightens when Essosa had written the title track about waiting for someone to come back to London, and on “Touch bby” she skipped the patience entirely. She was scheming to keep someone who had always been about to leave.
“.You’re thinkin’ short-term, but your brain might need reroutin’
Said you won’t do long distance, so I guess you’re stuck in town for now.”
The playfulness dissolves a couple bars later: “We’re on borrowed time now.” What started as a joke about sabotaging someone’s luggage became the EP’s frankest admission. The person was visiting, and he would go. The same EP that opened on “I think I’m ready to fall again” closed on “I’m better off without.” She skipped the breakup narrative between those poles and just shrugged: “You were punching anyway.” Essosa’s ear as a producer and creative director is ahead of where her pen sits on roughly a third of this material. She’s been studying since she was fourteen. The pen will catch up.
Favorite Track(s): “Missing U,” “Touch bby,” “He’s Not All That”