LA singer Banks was heralded as part of a wave of “alternative R&B” when she emerged in 2014. Her distorted vocals and experimental beats were categorised alongside Tinashe and FKA twigs – though the latter refuted the label, saying that her music was “punk”, and only tangentially related to R&B. Twigs was right, and with the benefit of hindsight, Banks’s murky trap-pop offerings sound little like the other artists she was grouped together with when she released her debut album, Goddess. After another album and a two-year break, Banks is back with III, an LP that kicks against this pigeonhole with streaming-friendly electronic soul ballads and post-Kanye West maximalist pop (colourful Glaswegian producer Hudson Mohawke had a large hand in the record).
Though she’s best known for her Auto-Tune-heavy ballads – and lead single Gimme doesn’t disappoint on this front – Banks lets loose on III with songs where her unaffected vocal runs free. On the rousing Look What You’re Doing to Me she takes the listener to church, while the understated Sawzall balances her vocal with soft brushstrokes of acoustic guitar, and Propaganda ends with some playful scatting. There’s piercing joy here (including a few too many samples of children’s voices), but the mood of the album largely feels scattered and unfocused, and nothing lands quite as well as the bass-heavy, vengeful breakup song template that she’s best known for. Banks sounds freer, and is showing new sides of herself, but they’re not all entirely convincing.
