‘I was driving on Sunset Boulevard, and I saw this broken-down altar on a corner,” Banks recalls. “It was crusting and brown and there was trash all around it. And it still looked really sacred for some reason.” The ecclesiastical scrap sighting made such an impact on the singer that she decided to christen her second album in tribute. “My music is the most sacred, holy thing that I have in my life,” she explains. “It’s like my truth; it’s my altar.”
The Altar comes three years after Banks’s sultry neo-R&B first got pulses racing. Then, it was stoked by a generous helping of enigma: no photos, no backstory, no social media – only an elusive mononym to muse on. Yet the mystery is long since solved – Jillian Banks is a 28-year-old Los Angeleno who was inspired to start writing music as a teenager by Fiona Apple and Lauryn Hill. And while her debut, Goddess, was impressive, it was also slightly formulaic. There have been some questionable live performances, too. All in all, it’s fair to say the past couple of years haven’t quite lived up to the initial hype.
There is one person, however, who has most definitely not lost the faith. “I started making music because I needed a place to listen to me. It was like my best friend,” Banks says. “It still is. It’s still my best friend, my most nurturing, loyal friend.” She might sound a bit much, but this therapy-session intensity is the most powerful tool in Banks’s arsenal – and it’s what makes The Altar such a compelling listen.
Her descriptions of creating particular songs err on the side of melodrama: “When I was writing it, I was like I don’t want to fucking say this stuff,” she says of closing track To the Hilt. “I got sick when I wrote it, like, my body wasn’t even ready to confront it, and I got physically sick.” But when you actually listen to Banks starkly trilling that she “hated you for leaving me” over a doomy piano riff, it all adds up to something affecting. Forget the inscrutability, or the trendy sound, or even the performance chops – Banks’s appeal now lies squarely in her emotional exposé.
It’s a surprise, then, to hear that at the core of The Altar was a cold rationality. “I had a lot of new subjects to tackle,” she says. A major one ended up being her newfound authority in the business. “I have a lot of people who work for me now: as a woman, you have to learn how to be a boss. Sometimes people don’t respect you right away; they don’t listen to what you’re saying because maybe you don’t even understand that you’re the boss. I would have things happen to me where I was like: if I was a guy, would this happen? I don’t think it would. I had to learn how to be unapologetic and unemotional about something that was emotional, which is my music.”
First to go was her meekness in rehearsals. “I like a closed soundcheck; there shouldn’t be people watching. Then, on my first few tours the front-of-house guy or the lighting guy would bring people or they would be taking pictures. I would call my manager who was at home and be like, ‘There’s somebody at soundcheck …’” she says in a timid voice. “Whereas now you have to be like: ‘There’s no one allowed at soundcheck. I don’t know why anyone’s in here.’ And then everyone calls you a bitch.”
Navigating the space between vulnerability and defiance is a big theme on The Altar. On Gemini Feed, Banks sarcastically addresses the boyfriend who has been controlling her (“To think you would get me to the altar, like I’d follow you around like a dog that needs water”). On Fuck With Myself she removes all power from any prospective manipulators: nobody messes with her mind like she does. The latter had a video in which Banks toys with a bald mannequin of herself, while dancers wearing masks of her face twitch in the background. “I’m becoming more confident with expressing myself visually and dreaming bigger,” she says.
Sonically, The Altar very much picks up where Goddess left off. Banks takes cues from 90s R&B, but comes at it from a sideways, almost DIY perspective – as if she’s reinventing the sound in her own 21st-century, slightly neurotic image. On Gemini Feed, for example, the phrasing is enjambed because of the low register. It’s something TLC used to do a lot, but Banks combines it with the haunting, slightly awkward production of a James Blake track. Yet despite being pretty verbose otherwise, Banks refuses to be drawn on the sound of her songs. “I make my own type of music – I’m my own genre,” she says serenely. Her sound doesn’t just come out of nowhere, though, does it? “I just write melodies that I need to. And create atmospheres that I need to create,” is all she’ll say.
She excels, in particular, at creating subtle, sophisticated gloom that comprises two contrasting moods: disquiet and serenity. “I’ve been depressed before, and when I talk about those stages I’ll say: I was feeling so dark,” she says of the former. “But then you could also say dark in a really beautiful, calm way. Like it was a dark room. They’re so different. One is dark in this gravity-feels-too heavy way, and one is dark in this really peaceful, quiet calm way, and one is negative, and one is really positive.”
This shadowy aura, thinks Banks, might be one of the reasons people tend to assume she’s British. “People still think I’m from here – they always say ‘UK-based singer’,” she says. “People are always like: ‘You don’t sound as if you’re from California,’ which is so funny because music doesn’t reflect the weather.” Yet it’s not only contemplative grey drizzle that links her to the UK. Banks’s very first label, Good Years, was London-based, and it brought her over to work with British producers including Jamie Woon and Lil Silva. It culminated in an EP she named London, recorded while staying in an Airbnb in east London. “I just thought it was the coolest place in the whole world,” she says. “I started my career off in the UK, I guess.”
Neatly, Banks is returning to this hallowed ground for The Altar’s launch next week. She hints that she’s planning some live appearances, too – they will be among her first performances of the new material, and she’s excited to get to grips with it. “That’s what is so fun about starting to do this, because you’re like, ‘Nice to meet you,’ then you make out, then you have sex. That’s what I do with my music, it’s like a process of getting to know it live,” she explains. Thanks to The Altar’s intimate revelations, it looks as though we’re all destined to get very closely acquainted with Jillian Banks, too.
• The Altar is released on Virgin EMI on 30 September.
