When Banks’s dusky voice first appeared early last year on the song Before I Ever Met You, there was no accompanying press photo nor tangible information about who she was, only a sliver of obsidian trip-hop so sultry that you could sense her pout on the microphone. Since then, her angsty, R&B-flavoured electronics and grainy monochrome videos have fuelled the enigma – which she’s managed to maintain, despite millions of people clicking her songs, countless fawning profiles likening her to film noir stars and, most notably, her strikingly intimate lyrics. Even the appearance of her own personal phone number, posted up on her Facebook page in case her fans ever fancy a chat, seems like something from a mystery thriller.
With that in mind, it comes as a surprise to find that Banks wants to meet in a no-frills nail salon, near her home in a well-heeled West Hollywood hood. “Ow, ow, ow! Can you not go so hard?” she squeals, as I witness her dainty feet flinch during an overzealous pedicure. This is the supposedly relaxing activity over which Banks has chosen to reveal herself to the Guardian; weird as it may seem to talk about your new album as someone files off your dead skin, it’s a rare bit of downtime for the singer and she was longing for some pampering. Following her first TV performance on the Jimmy Kimmel talkshow, she is about to head straight off to Asia and the UK for her biggest shows yet (including the O2 Academy Brixton – no pressure). Her schedule is so packed, in fact, that our original plan for us to go for a hike together in the Hollywood Hills was downgraded to a walk around the nearby park and now, somehow, $12-worth of awkward toenail clipping.
Over the past year, Banks has had to get used to unusual experiences fast. The first time she ever performed live was in west London last July, and by November she was supporting the Weeknd, the shadowy R&Ber she is often compared to, on an arena tour. “It’s incredible, but it’s overwhelming, as everything is new for me,” she says, talking through me to the TV on the wall behind. “I was thrown in the deep end and I had to figure it out. I’m learning to find my own way through.” Seeing herself sing live on Kimmel was one of those surreal “made it” moments, closely followed by the time she met and got stoned with Snoop Dogg at a gig earlier this year. “It was so strong! I never smoke and it fucked me up.”
Jillian Banks grew up in the San Fernando Valley and began making music at the age of 14, when her parents were going through a divorce. Her mother gave her a toy keyboard as a gift and she would shut the door, sit alone in her bedroom and write songs inspired by Fiona Apple, Tracy Chapman and Lauryn Hill, recording them on a Dictaphone. She ventured to the odd open-mic night with her friend Lily but her stage fright was so “horrendous”, she says, that she’d sing with her back to the audience. Music was so personal to her that she kept it secret for 10 years. “I didn’t do it for anybody but my own heart and soul, so it wasn’t necessary to tell anyone,” she says. “I was writing songs that were graphic and gritty and honest and raw; it was like my therapy.”
Instead of pursuing a career in music, she went to college to study psychology and wrote her thesis on the children of divorced parents. It was while she was studying that friend Lily – Collins, daughter of Phil, no less – sent some of her recordings across to Katy Perry’s tour DJ Yung Skeeter. He swiftly offered to manage her and hooked her up with UK label Good Years, co-run by A&R supremo Seb Chew, who in turn suggested she collaborate with homegrown producers Lil Silva and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, along with Vienna-based Londoner Sohn, whom Banks and her team fell for after his remix of Before I Ever Met You, and British singer Jamie Woon. Silva’s knack for skeletal but immersive drum patterns, TEED’s watery electro loveliness and Sohn’s cinematic, creeping atmospherics were paired with Banks’s 40-Sovereigns-a-day vocals, creating a sound that’s sexier than Lorde, sultrier than Lykke Li, and far less polarising than Lana Del Rey.
What really sets Banks apart, though, are her lyrics, particularly her unflinchingly intimate confessionals about doomed relationships. They can be vulnerable and earnest, come hither and coy, and often sound as if she’s reading from her diary, or letters, syllables breathlessly packed in. On Fuck Em Only We Know, an addictive make-out track on her upcoming debut album Goddess, she pulls out touching details like knowing “exactly just how many kisses fit between your eyes”. Waiting Game, meanwhile – essentially, a YA novel distilled in song – throbs with yearning and lust over evocative drums and static: “Baby I’m thinking it over/ The way you make me feel all sexy but it’s causing me shame”. Others offer no-filter observations of relationship minutiae, even from her first release, when she sang, “As for our house, I’ll move out/ You can keep the dog we trained” on Before I Ever Met You.
Goddess is full of moments like this but Banks hates the idea that she’s “down on love”. Rather, she says, many of her songs – and especially the album’s title track – are defined by the idea of empowerment. “It’s a big thing in my music, to highlight being human, being emotional, and powerful, like a goddess,” she says, just as a dash of inky-black polish is swept over her toes. “I want people to feel the times where they don’t feel good. You should dive into those emotions, because that’s what I do with my music. Being brave enough to just be unapologetic for who you are, that’s a goddess. It’s like, who wants to be a robot?”
We walk across to get a juice at the local supermarket, an establishment that makes Planet Organic look like Lidl, and Banks explains how she came to post her private number on a very public platform. “I wanted to connect to people but in a way that felt more reflective of who I was.” she says. “Twitter and those platforms just didn’t feel natural to me.” So far, her answerphone has been filled with thousands of fans sharing their secrets, would-be collaborators writing new verses to her songs, and the odd call from prison.
She starts welling up as she talks about one text in particular: “It was from somebody who worked with little kids who had gotten sexually abused, and this young girl was obsessed with my music and writing ‘goddess’ a hundred times in a notebook. She was saying that I was giving this little girl strength. It made me cry. It makes me cry, still,” she says, dabbing at her heavily kohled eyes.
Banks’s intensity is, admittedly, a little intimidating, but it’s a relief to see something real after an hour of describing music in terms of colours and herself as things like “very passionate and very sensitive”. She’s hardly consistently confessional: in person, she can be both sweetly guarded and disconcertingly aloof, which is frustrating, considering her music goes so deep. Maybe her glazed sincerity is a consequence of, as she describes in typical Banksian language, “feeling people really hard. I used to swallow people’s energies and then I learned, as I got older, that I’m too sensitive and I had to stop doing that. Now I don’t take as much in.”
Another thing she doesn’t take in is much of the chat that surrounds her music. Banks is talked about as being part of a new wave of R&B, mentioned in the same breath as new singers FKA twigs, Kelela and Tinashe – women who, influenced by 90s icons such as Brandy and Aaliyah, are propelling the sound on to the playlists of indie, electronic and pop fans alike. “I don’t know, I don’t think about it,” she says of how she feels about this exciting wave of women breathing new life into the genre (in a recent Guardian interview, FKA twigs was similarly quick to dismiss this classification). “I just view each artist as unique. What people would qualify as R&B is, for me, just soul. And I love honesty and soul and heavy, crunchy beats that move you and make you breathe a little bit faster.”
Indeed, Goddess has the emotional heft to quicken your pulse: Adele-sized piano epics and pared-back acoustic ditties sit alongside slinky dancefloor jams and apocalyptic ballads. You get the idea that Banks is just tired of people prying into her personal life when she’s laid it so openly and brilliantly in song. “It feels like I’ve captured every layer of who I am as a person and an artist and a woman and everything I’m doing my best… I’m being as honest as I can,” she says, smiling, as she gathers up her long, black, flowing kimono to leave. She urges me to buy one of the shop’s “life-changing” gluten-free oatmeal cookies and glides away, another photo shoot to do, another chia-seed smoothie to drink.
Goddess is out in the UK on 8 Sep
