Banks Finds Her Way Back From the Darkness

At the beginning of 2020, Jillian Banks—better known simply as Banks—was coming off the back of a sold-out tour for her third album, III, which earned her both the best reviews and the highest chart placements of her career. It’s easy to imagine that she was riding high; but between a series of ongoing health issues, a grueling tour, and a traumatic breakup, Banks was burnt out. And inevitably, as soon as the first lockdowns began, she simply crashed. 

“I was exhausted, and depressed, and I had my first anxiety attack,” Banks recalls. “My sister used to have them, and I would think to myself, It’s just anxiety—you’re not actually going to die. But, no. You really feel like you are. I cracked through the bottom, but I think I needed to go there. It was a huge wake-up call for me. I realized that I needed to interact with my life differently to get the most joy out of it and enjoy the things that I’ve been blessed with and accomplished,” she says with an audible sigh. “The tour for my last album was the most brutal tour I’ve ever gone through and it was mainly because of the pressure I put on myself.”

Among those pressures was a spine fracture suffered three months before the tour, which involved extensive choreography. Banks would bring a mattress to the rehearsal studio so that she could lie down while her band practiced, and underwent both regular steroid epidurals and intense physical therapy. “My management said we could postpone and I was like, ‘No, we can’t,’” she says. Around the same time, she was diagnosed with the autoimmune disorder Hashimoto’s disease, and had to take steroid shots just to get her vocal cords through a performance. 

It’s no wonder, then, that by the time the pandemic arrived, her body shut down. “My autoimmune stuff was flared up, my back was messed up, my body was overtired, my adrenals were messed up,” she says. “I actually kind of hit a really dark place, but it was a place that I needed to go through to really confront some things. The big demons in my head that take away joy in my life.” Not by coincidence, these demons directly influenced the lead single of Banks’s new single, “The Devil,” released today alongside a gloriously theatrical video. Instead of referencing what drove her to her lowest point, the titular devil reflects her newfound sense of control. “In order to overcome those demons, you have to be stronger than a demon,” she explains. “What’s stronger than a demon? A devil. I couldn’t be some kind, sweet, polite person to get over the certain things that I needed to get over. You have to be a devil.”

Inspired by the gaudy, surrealist visuals of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula and the kitschy, body horror delights of Robert Zemeckis’s Death Becomes Her, the video marks a playful new direction for Banks. (In something of a clue to where she was headed, Banks posted an image in February of Isabella Rossellini as the glamorous, red-lipped socialite offering a mysterious elixir of youth in the latter film.) Playing a femme fatale in thigh-high, blood-red PVC boots and a slinky knit dress with a cut-out detail, Banks lures a lover by biting the rose she offers him and spitting blood. They drive in a sports car before she hisses with a forked tongue, dances with her harem of witchy sisters in a desert and a dive bar, and eventually forces her lover into a Perspex box and seals him in.

“We wanted it campy in the best way possible,” says Banks. “When I was talking with Jenna Marsh, who directed it with me, we kept coming back to that word. I just wanted to have fun and play a character. There is strength in feeling comfortable enough to find the humor in it, that you can take the piss out of yourself a bit. I’m in a really good place right now in general, so it felt like an empowering first introduction back.”

Where her previous projects saw her work with the cream of electronic and alternative pop, from Hudson Mohawke to Lil Silva to Shlohmo, Banks chose a different tack for her next album, which is set to arrive later this year. Taking the time during lockdown to master the production software Ableton, she coproduced it with an unusually slimmed-down list of associates. “It almost feels like learning how to write a song all over again,” she says of claiming near-total control of the production process. “Every little thing you learn feels like a new world opening up. And ironically after learning more and more about production, I’m almost more into my raw voice than I’ve ever been before. My animal self is free in this album. It’s me at my core.” 

While details of the album remain under lock and key for now, Banks is more than ready to hit the road again. “I’m so excited; I really miss touring,” she says. “I’m going to be playing the piano a lot more, but there’s also going to be a lot of movement. I’ve been training with this choreographer I love, Todd Williamson. The world is my oyster!” Is she worried at all about putting herself through that demanding process again? “I’m not in that place now,” she says, firmly. “I’m not even worried about it. I love performing and touring. You have to learn so much along the way in this business; it’s like the Wild West. You don’t know until you mess up and you’ve made the mistake, and then you have to pick yourself up and keep going.”

It’s partly for that reason that the record marks Banks’s first release as an independent artist. After the tribulations of the past few years, taking back the reins was a decision that only felt natural. “I’ve never felt so independent in my life,” she says. “I’ve never felt so at peace with myself and in the flow of who I am and what I want. Ironically, that’s when you draw the right people to you, and I’ve also happened to fall in love with a wonderful person. But I own my masters now. I have control over every aspect of my career. I choose every photographer I work with, I choose when I want my music to come out, I choose what comes out first. I’m just trusting myself more than ever—trusting my gut.”

It’s this sense of fierce autonomy and reliance on instinct that she hopes fans will take away from “The Devil”—and the eclectic lineup of songs still to come from the album. “The last year and a half has at times made everyone feel so powerless, and I hope that when people hear this song they feel the opposite, sexy and powerful,” she concludes. Maybe we could all do with getting in touch with our inner devil from time to time? Banks certainly makes it sound like a lot of fun.

Originally Appeared on Vogue