Banks - III

The Guardian 100

(Harvest)

Jillian Rose Banks has spent the past six years making fascinating, sedated songs that vacillate between trap-pop and R&B. Now, with music’s dominant sound moving in her direction, the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter’s third and most impressive album yet only lacks the helicopter hit that would lift her to a higher level of stardom.

As with all the best sets, it’s coherent but not repetitive, the ghostly Auto-Tune choir, which features on most tracks, sighing and whispering encouragement behind Banks’s increasingly empowered words. There are shades of Bon Iver and Billie Eilish in her layered, subtle sound, but also a rare, steely delicacy all her own.

Pitchfork 65

While the brooding pop singer can’t always shake the anodyne songwriting that plagued her past work, III is still Banks’ best album to date.

The Guardian 40

(Harvest Records)
Her third album is a less-than-convincing attempt to lighten the old experimentalism in favour of chart-friendly ballads

LA singer Banks was heralded as part of a wave of “alternative R&B” when she emerged in 2014. Her distorted vocals and experimental beats were categorised alongside Tinashe and FKA twigs – though the latter refuted the label, saying that her music was “punk”, and only tangentially related to R&B. Twigs was right, and with the benefit of hindsight, Banks’s murky trap-pop offerings sound little like the other artists she was grouped together with when she released her debut album, Goddess. After another album and a two-year break, Banks is back with III, an LP that kicks against this pigeonhole with streaming-friendly electronic soul ballads and post-Kanye West maximalist pop (colourful Glaswegian producer Hudson Mohawke had a large hand in the record).