Released last Friday, September 30, The Altar by Jillian Rose Banks, better known as simply Banks, is detailed, confessional, and cutting-edge personal. The album cover offers a glimpse of this open honesty; a grayscale image of Banks without makeup and with her curly hair in a simple updo stares directly at the camera, every freckle on her face visible. Already this was a contrast from her debut album Goddess, where she was only in profile; while Goddess, too, was intensely personal and introduced Banks onto the music scene as a reigning music indie queen, it was more introverted and downtempo. In contrast, The Altar, from the get-go, is darker, grittier and more rhythmic, but whereas other artists too often lose a sense of honesty and closeness in taking their music in a larger direction, Banks retains the same diaristic, confessional, bleeding honesty that so many had fallen in love with.
In fact, sometimes in its intense ferocity, it often comes off as even more honest than Goddess. Every song finds Banks baring her all, offering all her all her pure emotions before the world to flare in front of us, whether they manifest in the stream of longing seen in “Lovesick” (“I’m lovesick, I’m not even ashamed/ And I’m hard up for some time in your sheets”), the explosion of fury and paranoia in “Trainwreck,” or the brooding introspection of “Mother Earth.” And in “Mind Games,” arguably her most emotional song ever, her voice rings with almost-tangible desperation: “Do you see me now?”
There’s also an experimentation with different musical landscapes here that add enough variety to prevent the album from dragging into a slew of drudgery. Judas’s dark, hip-hop influenced rhythm elevate the song as one of the best on the album; they perfectly complement the chilling lyrical imagery (“I found all your skeletons, a closet full of bones/ I see you take pride in bloody eyes, I know you’re stoned”). Trainwreck is arguably the most experimental song in Banks’s discography, with almost rap-like, rapid-fire verses interspersing a trappy, electronic chorus that explodes like a bomb, where Bank does not hold back in the slightest for taunting her ex-lover (“Hey, you try to compensate/ For thinking with you one brain I should decapitate”). “Haunt,” “Weaker Girl,” and “This Is Not About Us” are excellently crafted and multilayered R&B. The distorted male background vocals in “Poltergeist” and “Mind Games” add so much texture. Lead single “Fuck With Myself” has sparse instrumentation and a seductive vocal performance that calls to mind FKA Twiggs.
For those who prefer the instrumentation on Goddess, there’s still plenty of material to please their preferences. “Mother Earth” find Banks pulling herself out of her depression, singing modestly over strumming guitar and some orchestral string—it’s a vulnerable ballad reminiscent of much of Goddess. The pulsing, downtempo rhythm and sensual vocal delivery of “Lovesick” make it timeless as Banks perfectly encapsulates the pure, yearning desire of love. “To The Hilt” is a classic Banks piano ballad, mourning a dead relationship and the emptiness that comes with it, including the loss of creativity, musically much like “Waiting Game” or “You Should Know Where I’m Coming From.”
Banks has clearly sharpened both her lyrical and melodical writing from her debut. Whereas on Goddess, some of the lyrics seem clunkily woven into the melodies (see the bridge of “Someone New”), there are few of these violations on The Altar. Opening track “Gemini Feed”, released as the second single, epitomizes these improvements. For a song of the traditional structure, it’s one of Bank’s most succinct lyrical wise, yet every word uttered packs a punch, and the chorus hits as one of her catchiest ever, exploding with “And to think you would get me to the altar/ Like I follow you around like a dog that needs water.” Judas has perhaps my favorite lyric in the whole album: “All the mystique of your pretentiousness is fading”.
But it’s not just that the lyrics themselves have become better (even before, they had been exceptional), but it seems Banks has become so much more courageous in the way she asserts them. In “Weaker Girl”, she directly declares to a former lover: “I think you need a weaker girl/ ‘Cause I’mma need a bad motherfucker like me”. Similarly, in “This Is Not About Us”, direct even in the title of the song, she implicates her partner “I see you clinging to your pinch of hope/ Trying to get in my bed/ You should be thinking of a way of moving on instead”. If this is what being savage is, then bring it on.
One thing’s for sure—music is clearly the ultimate catharsis for Jillian Banks. And in the process of healing herself, she will heal so many heartbroken fans who turn to her music when they, too, need emotional relief and to feel less lonely in a chaotic world.
