The alt-pop singer-songwriter talks separating the mind and the soul, reuniting with Sampha for a track ten years in the making, and how her new album pays tribute to the complexity of the human experience.
“I feel like the mother of the person who was performing back then,” says Jillian Banks, known to the masses by the mononym Banks. The alt-pop singer-songwriter has just spent the morning wayfaring the stage and stalls of Camden’s iconic music venue KOKO, which we’ve caught at a rare moment of quiet, the large hall so bare that a hushed word could find itself reaching from the stage to the balcony with almost no effort at all. In twelve hours, the venue’s distinctive deep red and gold painted walls will come alive with vibration, and the dance floor will be filled with sweaty bodies. For now, though, the quiet of KOKO makes it the perfect place to reflect on past lives. “The first few shows you do become core memories.” Banks says. “This was where I debuted my first album, Goddess, in 2014. It’s a very special place.” The venue is also where she held the landmark ten-year anniversary show for her breakthrough debut, which upon release had marked her as one of pop’s most exciting new voices. The string of anniversary shows was accompanied by a stripped-back reimagining of the album, released at the tail-end of 2024. “I’m in such a different place now.” She tells me, over a coffee at member’s club House of KOKO. “You could tell that the audience were made up of people who felt affected by the album all those years ago and wanted to celebrate its existence, too. People were screaming every lyric.”
A lot has changed since Banks first took the stage at KOKO a decade ago. An Angelino born and raised, she recently made the move to Seattle with her partner, distancing herself from the hustle culture of Los Angeles’ entertainment industry in favour of something a little more organic. She jokes that her cortisol levels have lowered significantly since the move, whilst also lamenting being away from her hometown during the wake of the fires that devastated the city in January. “It feels bittersweet to have left. When you move away from something because you feel drained of it, only to see that thing destroyed, you start to appreciate the beauty of it. It’s really sad seeing that happen to my hometown. But generally, as a base, Seattle has been really good for my nervous system.”
The change of scenery has also shaped how she wants to prioritise her artistry going forward. “A lot of us get caught up in this idea that our worth is dependent on how our art does, or how we feel like it’s being received. With time, I realized that I was wanting more balance in my life,” says Banks, who, though she describes herself as anxious, talks with such level-headed resolve that it’s hard to imagine a time when she wasn’t in complete balance. “I’ve gone through stages where I haven’t created for months. If your only love is creating music, then you don’t have anything else to write about. You have to experience other loves, you gotta go and live life for six months until you feel like you’re going to barf if you don’t write something down.”
Banks. KOKO, Camden. 2025. By Olivia Richardson.
“Your mind isn’t really you. It’s just this child that learned to protect itself by all of these defence mechanisms that it picked up through early trauma. I think your soul lives in your stomach. In your gut instinct. It doesn’t reside in that heady process of thinking, thinking, thinking.”
After some time spent putting purpose to a life outside of her music, Banks has emerged from her cocoon with Off With Her Head, her fifth full-length LP that ushers in a new era for the artist while lovingly closing a loop that began with Goddess—a celebration of who Banks is, was and will be.
Understandably, “celebration” may not be the trigger-response when thinking of Medieval-era decapitation. But it’s an execution of demons, not of flesh, that Banks is after with Off With Her Head—and, after all, if you want to perform an exorcism, you have to get your hands dirty. “It sounds negative,” she explains. “It’s obviously insinuating death. It’s violent. But I think in order to get rid of the negative voices in your head you have to resort to savagery. You have to cut it off. You don’t reason with them, because there’s no reason for them. They just hold you back. Off With Her Head is about getting out of your head and into your body.”
Releasing on streaming services on February 28th, Off With Her Head opens with a declaration of violence. On track one ‘Guillotine’, Banks announces the album’s most prominent themes with clarity and command, like a poker player laying down a royal flush. “Whose side are you on?” She croons, “you say it’s mine, but now I’m full grown, and I see it all clear.” The song ends with a blast of distortion. “I won’t let you talk” She finishes, dealing a killing blow: “Put the tape on your mouth and your head on the block.”
“Your mind isn’t really you,” She tells me, continuing her train of thought. “It’s just this child that learned to protect itself by all of these defence mechanisms that it picked up through early trauma. I think your soul lives in your stomach. In your gut instinct. It doesn’t reside in that heady process of thinking, thinking, thinking. There’s that idea that if you hear someone talking in your head, then is that voice you?”
Famously private, Banks has consciously kept her social media presence to a healthy minimum, rejecting the recent industry shift toward an algorithm-based strategy of self-promotion. “I’m at a place where I can have fun with it, but using the internet as a mode of valuing an artist is cheap. It’s always ‘make a TikTok.’ “What do you want to do to promote a song? ‘TikTok.’ ‘Make a dance, make it into a TikTok.’ Art isn’t a rushed process. How can it be real art if it’s coming from a place of wanting virality or commerce? It can be exhausting for an artist, especially the introverted ones. But it’s the way things are: it’s either get with it or get happy.”
Still, there stands an army behind the musician. Browse the comments of a Banks music video or performance on YouTube and you’ll find thousands of testimonies by those who have been following her music since she emerged on the scene in 2013. One user recollects downloading her early track ‘Begging For Threat’ on her sister’s hand-me-down Samsung Galaxy Note in 2014, while another describes using Off With Her Head standout ‘Best Friend’ as the soundtrack to their own friendship breakup. “Those kinds of breakups can be just as hard as romantic ones.” she says of the track, which vulnerably charts the end of a platonic relationship. The lyrics are telling, finding Banks just as accountable as the person she’s singing to. Is the song intended as an olive branch? “It’s more of a period at the end of a sentence,” she replies.
I tell Banks of my own first brush with her music, a decade ago, in which a then-girlfriend had sent me ‘Someone New’, a Goddess deep-cut that became an epilogue of sorts to our already-doomed relationship. “Oh fuck.” She sighs. “She was really trying to break your heart. What’s worse is that I sent that song to who I wrote it about, and we hadn’t been talking, and I was like ‘here, I wrote this about you’ [laughs] like, way to just fuck someone up emotionally.”
Banks. KOKO, Camden. 2025. By Olivia Richardson.
“You have to love the shadow of the people you’re close with, or else you don’t love their whole selves.”
But this is the beauty of Banks’ songwriting: though she may drive an arrow through the hearts of both subjects and listener alike, no one is painted as hero or villain. Instead, she prefers her storytelling to thrive in the complex greys of the human experience. To Banks, imperfections are endearing. “You have to love the shadow of the people you’re close with,” she muses. “Or else you don’t love their whole selves.”
She puts this to practise on ‘Delulu’, a twisted love letter to the irrationality of heartache that follows a woman on a warpath after suffering through a bout of unrequited love. “‘Delulu’ is about honouring your crazy. You can take that story in so many directions. You could write something depressing, you could write something self loathing, or something that wallows in that feeling of rejection. For me, that song and this album finds joy in human nature and gratitude in the complicated experience of being alive. There’s duality in all of us.” The self-explanatory ‘I hate Your Ex-Girlfriend’ embodies a similar energy, this time recruiting breakthrough rapper Doechii to help hammer the point home via a deliciously petty club track that wouldn’t feel out of place at a high-fashion runway or a drag-ball. “I hate your ex-girlfriend” Banks sings on the chorus, “obvious she ain’t found someone yet, i’ma send some flowers to her ego so then at least she walks away with something.”
The feature, as all of Banks’ collaborations, came about organically, after Doechii expressed that she had previously been influenced by Goddess. “She mentioned that the album was a big inspiration for her. It’s great to hear that from people who are creatively special people, and who inspire me right back. I love that song. I always like to start new chapters with a punch to the gut. And that one is very in your face.”
Amidst a tracklist of musical firecrackers like ‘Delulu’, ‘I Hate Your Ex-Girlfriend’ and stream-of-consciousness alt-pop banger ‘Meddle in the Mold‘ (perhaps the album’s best), ‘Stay’ serves as the album’s exhale—a buttery interlude that sees Banks bring her impassioned vocals to a near whisper over a bittersweet piano melody. “It’s joyful and warm,” she says about the song. “And I think the album in general has a joy and warmth to it that my music has never had before, because I’ve never felt it before. I’m just in a different place in my life, and I value my life outside this music world a bit more than I used to.”
Banks. KOKO, Camden. 2025. By Olivia Richardson.
To record the album, Banks reunited with many of the collaborators who helped her bring Goddess to life, as well as a few who were there from even earlier on, when the then-upstart songwriter recorded her EP London in the Big Smoke. She excitedly whips her phone from her pocket and retrieves an image of her in a London studio over a decade prior, sandwiched between producer Lil’ Silva and singer and South-London native Sampha, who would go on to earn acclaim with his Mercury Prize-winning debut Process in 2017 and follow-up Lahai in 2023. The image, she tells me, was taken during the making of London, where the three began working on ‘Make It Up’, a previously unreleased track that has finally found its way to the surface on Off With Her Head. “It’s not that we weren’t ready to release it, it just didn’t happen, and all of our lives went in different directions. That’s why it’s so special when souls collide again and it’s like no time has passed. The soul of the songwriter is always the same. You grow and you have different experiences, but where music comes from, that moment of love-at-first sight with the craft, whether it stems from pain, or a therapeutic outlet, or simply an interest in melody, it all starts from the same place. Even if your sound changes, the through-line is always present.” I ask where that through-line started for her. “From the validation of feeling heard for the first time,” she replies. “Even when no one was listening to what I was writing. Just feeling that the universe, at least, was hearing me.” It makes sense, then, that the songwriter has developed a reputation for making others feel seen and heard. On ‘River’, she imagines a young girl discovering the power she holds over men. In 2022, she released Generations of women from the moon, a poetry book that she alluded to as letters to her younger self. “I wish someone would have read that to me when I was little.” she says. “A lot of art is saying out loud what you need to hear.”
In some ways, Off With Her Head is an extension of such an approach: lessons for the person you used to be. “It’s advice from me to myself to live in my body and to therefore find more joy. Being in your body means being present.” I ask if she’s always been able to straddle the line between healthy self-reflection and obsessive overthinking so delicately. “I’ve always been an empathetic person. I can feel other people, I can really put myself in someone else’s shoes. But no,” she says with a good-natured laugh. “I’ve been an anxious freak all my life.”
Off With Her Head is available on all streaming services on 28th February.
Banks. KOKO, Camden. 2025. By Olivia Richardson.
