Banks Is a Fully-Formed Thing

"You don't have to understand," sings Banks on the opening track of her latest album, Serpentina. Musically, this introduction—along with most of the rest of the full-length release, her first in four years—sounds like celebratory, fuck-all joy. "Please let me be misunderstood," she trills. For the first time in her career, she means it.

"It's free, this album," Jillian Banks tells me over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. Banks is known for her private nature; when we meet, her camera is off. "It's about feeling strong, getting through something, recognizing yourself and loving that. Acceptance, really." "Misunderstood," the album's intro, assures the listener that they don't need to understand what they're about to hear. "It's from my soul," she says. "You can't judge someone's soul."

Banks is probably used to some misinterpretation. In her near-decade-long career making music in a genre hybrid that might best be described as alternative R&B synth-pop, she's made a name for herself while simultaneously floating somewhere just under the radar. Her 2014 full-length début, Goddess, nearly topped the charts. A year later, she joined the Weeknd and Travis Scott on tour. 2016's Altar performed well; in 2019, she toured following the release of III. Offstage, however, Jillian Banks was struggling for self-acceptance.

"I would look at myself on stage in front of thousands of people and think, 'Is that me? I don't feel like that.' I felt disjointed," she recalls. At the time, she kept her personal life as Jillian Banks and her musical persona very separate. She kept her love life and family off social media and avoided revealing too much in interviews. Even now, she admits it's sometimes hard to open up—but there's a difference. "I feel like I've grown more in the last few years than I had in ten years," a period of growth she says started during, and because of, the enforced isolation of the pandemic.

Just prior to the lockdown, Banks was finishing a tour. "I had been pushing myself so hard. Past what was healthy, for sure," she recalls. A spinal fracture was followed by an autoimmune diagnosis, both exacerbated by nonstop performing and her "own personal demons," she says, hesitating. "Interviews are interesting," she says. "Sometimes I don't know how much I want to go into the super super intimate details about certain things." But she realized that the depression she’s dealt with on and off since she was younger and what she describes as her crazy perfectionism were actually quite typical. "Anxiety came rearing its head bigger than ever."

She was set to tour again throughout 2020, but the pandemic forced her to cancel and she stayed home. In retrospect, it was what she needed. "I've always known music is my life and my passion—it helps me so much mentally," she says. But with the stress and the grind of touring and producing, she says it was hard to remember that. Then, "when shit really hit the fan in the world, I just fell in love with music all over again. I think that's part of why this album for me feels so special: I just fell in love with music in the purest way." Alone at home, as she adapted to life in isolation, she started learning Ableton. The solitude allowed her to work whenever she felt inspired—if it hit her at seven in the evening, she'd work until four in the morning. If it hit her at seven in the morning, she'd go until one in the afternoon. "It was almost nomadic," she recalls.

During the same period of creativity, she found herself facing her demons—and realizing that she had the capacity to overcome them. "When you're alone, you're confronted so much with your own bullshit," she says, "your own complexes that make life so much more painful and harder. And that's what happened to me—I hit rock bottom and came through it just feeling free." With Serpentina written, she went into recording it, co-producing every track on the album. Shlohmo, an artist with whom she had created her earlier work and with whom she describes having a special musical chemistry, helped produce most of the album. The result is music that Banks says people have described as sounding "like you're sitting right next to me—which I love."

With Serpentina, "I think I'm the best artist that I've ever been," Banks says, in part because of the hands-on aspect of writing, engineering, producing, and creating. But she says it's also thanks to something more personal: "I'm at a new place in my life. I feel more confident than I ever have, more self-accepting. With that comes a freedom in the music I'm making, and there's a brightness to the songs in this album that really naturally came out because I was feeling that way." The bright, white backgrounds of the album's art direction are a new turn for Banks, whose first three records were moody and dark. They reflect the same brightness that comes through in the music.

"Meteorite," Serpentina's danceable second track, is one of Banks's personal favorites from the album. She describes "Fuck Love," which she wrote while in a relationship, as an anthem of independence because it's nice to feel that sometimes. "I Still Love You," the album's closing track, was written twelve years ago. When she went through phases of feeling disjointed and ultra-protective of her personal life, she never felt it belonged on an album—until now. "Again, I'm feeling more like one being," she adds. "I think that is one of the best songs I've ever written. I'm excited for people to dive into that."

These days, Jillian Banks spends a lot of her time doing yoga, dancing, hiking in and around Los Angeles, and going for very, very long walks. For the first time, she's open online about the existence of a romantic relationship. "I've never done that before. I've never posted a picture of a boyfriend or anything, and that feels really good," she says. "It felt natural to me, merging what I thought were my two separate lives." Still, she says, referencing the album's title, "I'm sure I'll ebb and flow with it—like a snake."

Given her healthier, happier lifestyle, I ask Banks if pain makes better art. She doesn't think so. "Obstacles in life definitely lead to wisdom," she says. More wisdom and more empathy, and a better understanding of life. But to create, she says, all you need is something to say. "You need to want to express something," she says. "That can be joy. That can be falling in love. That can be attraction, jealousy, anything. Pain, grief, loss—but also, you know, connecting with someone again." On Serpentina, this shows by way of melodies and lyrics (Jillian is also a poet) that speak not only to joy, fun, and movement but also to heartbreak and loss, regeneration, and growth. "It kind of has everything," she says. "It's a fully-formed thing."

Serpentina is out now. Banks begins her Serpentina Tour on July 11 in Austin. Read this story and many more in print by preordering our CERO04 here.