How BANKS Slithered Into the Driver’s Seat
The audacious musician tells The Daily Beast about screaming harder and feeling “freer than ever” on her thrilling fourth album.
Once you press play on BANKS’ new album, it takes all of 30 seconds for her to tell you she doesn’t really care if you get her or not. “If I had just one dollar for every time somebody didn’t listen, I wouldn’t need these vocals, man / But I still got my mic in hand,” she asserts, before getting to the crux of the acerbic opening track: “Please let me be, please let me be misunderstood.”
“It’s just kind of like, this is me, this is my art, and if you don’t understand it, that’s cool, because it’s mine. It’s not yours anyway to understand. And if you do understand it, then we can have it together,” the musician tells The Daily Beast about the aptly titled “Misunderstood.” “It’s like, every time you didn’t listen it made me have to scream harder, and that’s what gave me my voice.”
It’s a fitting statement from an artist who, ever since emerging on SoundCloud in 2013, has never been able to be boxed in. The 33-year-old California native, born Jillian Rose Banks, established herself as a brooding, alt-R&B oddity with her first two albums, Goddess and The Altar, which landed her on tour with The Weeknd and tacitly inspired the Lordes and Billie Eilishes of the latter-day pop scene. By the time she dropped III in 2019, she was taking bigger swings into darker, weirder places, cutting through steely, Yeezus-like production with a voice that could sound like a fragile whisper one minute and distorted menace the next.
Her taste for emotionally-gutting thrills continues on her fourth album, Serpentina, released on Friday. It’s been a long time coming; she unleashed the lead single, “The Devil,” back in June 2021, a sexy voyage into the underworld accented by horror-film screams and hushed vocals about morphing into her most sinister self. And now that the world is starting to open back up, she’s doing the same, excitedly plotting a summer tour and mentally preparing to share these songs, her “babies,” with the world.
BANKS is somewhat restrained and soft-spoken when talking about her music, which is surprising considering her new, hard-won ownership of it. This is her first release as an independent artist who now owns her master recordings, a feat that has made her “feel freer than ever and more in control” after an especially taxing two-year period following her tour for III at the beginning of 2020. Besides coinciding with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the end of that tour also found BANKS recovering from a breakup, a spinal fracture, and a diagnosis of Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune thyroid disease. Physically and mentally exhausted, she returned home to Los Angeles and took a break, albeit a short one. It wasn’t long before she started writing new music; not with the intention of making an album, but “purely as therapy,” as she’s done since she was a teenager. But this time, everything was different, from the setting—she built a studio in her home so she could work whenever she wanted—to the slimmed-down list of collaborators, which includes Shlohmo, the producer behind her 2014 fan-favorite single “Brain.”
“It began out of just acclimating to my environment and because I couldn’t go to the studio and I couldn’t work with other producers or engineers,” BANKS says about taking the reins on Serpentina. “So I was like, OK, well, I guess I’ll just have to learn how to engineer myself and learn how to do production completely on my own. So it started out of necessity and ended up being the biggest blessing of my life.”
“It feels so empowering just doing it on my own,” she elaborates. “It’s such an amazing feeling being able to just sit in the studio and not only write the song, but produce it and create the sounds and have a vision come to life by me. I really was focused on having my voice be on top of the music pretty heavy on this album. I thought that was really important for me as a musician, because at the base of who I am, I’m a songwriter. When I first got into it, it wasn’t even about production, it was just about chords, progressions, and lyrics. I liked getting back to the basics in that way.”
One of the most striking examples of that approach is the closing track, a bare-boned piano ballad called “I Still Love You” that she’s kept in the vault for over a decade.
“I wrote it about somebody when I was 20 that I was in love with—or 23, or however old I was,” she says. “I don’t think about him anymore, but when I hear the song, it still affects me. I think that’s what’s so beautiful about music, it’s timeless. ‘I Still Love You’ is so easy for me because it’s literally just like I could play it in my sleep. It’s in my blood at this point. It’s become a part of me.”
“But it was time to let that one free and I’m really happy I did,” she continues. “It kind of just lets you keep moving forward rather than focusing on the past, like a fresh slate, creating all new things.”
She similarly rips her heart open on songs like “Birds by the Sea,” about a past love who’s now having a baby with another woman, and the masochist-minded “Burn” (“I’ll be your candle, watch me burn”). But the throughline of the album is strength—even when she’s mourning or ruminating, she ultimately arrives at a place of self-assuredness, especially on “Deadend,” which finds her telling an ex, “I don’t want another dead end… I’m done tryna write about you,” and “Skinnydipped,” a soul-cleanser of a song that’ll make you wonder how she hasn’t done more hip-hop features during her almost decade-long career. (She doesn’t know either, actually: “Maybe I will do some more. That sounds really fun, it just needs to be right.”)
It all feeds into the concept of Serpentina: a title inspired by, yes, snakes, but also the idea of rebirth and shedding your skin so you can keep evolving. Or as BANKS puts it, “It’s about confidence and trusting your own intuition. Belief in yourself and belief in your direction, in your vision.”
“When I was younger, I used to doodle the word ‘serpentine’ all the time in class, just because I thought it was beautiful-looking,” she says. “I started doing that when I was thinking of the name, and I put an ‘a’ on the end because it felt really divine and kind of goddess energy. The word ‘serpentina’ felt like a chapter, a big chapter in life, or a moment, or an energy to carry with you, and it felt like the energy of the album.”
That energy comes through most glaringly on the album’s maximalist, door-busting moments, of which there are plenty (“Beggin for Thread” stans won’t be left disappointed). On standout track “Meteorite,” she flirtily swears to leave her inhibitions at the door, then wades into trap-pop territory on the uber-confident “Fuck Love.” And then there’s “Spirit,” a wildly optimistic, gospel-fueled anthem featuring the singer Samoht.
“He’s one of my friends and his voice just melts me,” BANKS says. “That song is about lifting each other up. The world needs that so badly right now. Those gospel melodies and the voices, I’ve always been so drawn to them, and I think having them more involved in this album… you can tell there’s a lot of influence even on the songs that aren’t necessarily so obviously influenced by it.”
Perhaps the best example of that is also Serpentina’s brightest spot: “Holding Back,” which boasts a booming, twitching beat, a pitched-up chorus, and BANKS’ most energized sound to date. The once social media-shy artist has even embraced TikTok by duetting with her fans on the “Holding Back” open verse challenge, reacting to strangers’ interpretations of her work with an amusement you wouldn’t necessarily expect from someone so ostensibly guarded.
“I love when a song that I write affects somebody,” she says. “I love when it helps them through something or they feel understood by it and it feels like maybe we’ve been through something similar if we both connect to the concept of this song. But I actually don’t even… whenever I’m in interviews and people are asking me what a song is about, I don’t even really like saying it, just because if it is about something else for someone else and it helps them get through that, then if they hear me say that it’s about something else, maybe it won’t do that for them anymore. It can be about different things for different people.”
The important thing to her is that people take the time to listen before arriving at a place of understanding (or misunderstanding, as that opening track implies). “I hope people listen to this and feel empowered and happy,” she says, much in the same way she felt making these songs—in her own house, on her own terms, and with a new sense of confidence in her work.
So when, at a listening session in Los Angeles two days after we spoke, BANKS was getting ready to play a new track from Serpentina, she wasn’t shy about asking a particularly chatty group of people in the back of the room to quiet down and listen up. “See, I probably wouldn’t have said something before. I would’ve just talked over people at my own fucking event,” she said, before insisting the speakers be turned all the way up.
Misunderstand her all you want, but it’ll only make her louder.