Banks: "I remember feeling that I was just this little grain in a box"

Calling your debut album Goddess might seem like the mark of an overinflated ego, but in many senses, Jillian Banks is the mistress of her own universe. She dresses the part (primarily black, flowy garments that are a wind-machine operator's dream), she is suitably enigmatic – her stark, bluntly capitalised stage name of BANKS helps with that. Most importantly, she writes songs that are self-empowering in their brazen lyrical honesty.

Banks's brand of intimate, melancholic, occasionally glitchy but consistently groove- driven songs puts her in a category that includes acts such as James Blake and former touring partner The Weeknd. She has worked with some high-profile collaborators on the album, including a number of UK producers and artists such as Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Sohn, and Jamie Woon. She has shunned social media as a marketing tool (both her Twitter and Facebook pages are run by her management) and one journalist described her as 'the anti-Miley Cyrus' – but still, she doesn't understand the labels she's been landed with.

“I don’t get the ‘dark’ thing,” she says. “I don’t know what that means. I’m just me. I feel things really hard, and I write about them. I write about them to be more sane and to be more centred, and because that’s how I communicate. I’m dark sometimes, and I’m the lightest, brightest sometimes. Like everyone else is.”

In any case, the 25-year-old has found herself in demand this year, topping Next Big Thing polls across the globe and generally creating quite a stir with her dark, bewitching, minimalist electro-pop. When we speak, she has just arrived home to her native Los Angeles, fresh off a plane from a short tour of Asia that saw her play in Bali, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo and Osaka.

She has certainly come a long way since her bedroom compositions as a melancholic teen. Before Banks transitioned into BANKS, songwriting was a form of therapy after her parents’ divorce. At 15, she began composing her own snippets of songs on a toy keyboard given to her by a friend, teaching herself to play as she went along.

“When I was first starting, they weren’t exactly finished, structured songs . . . they were more ideas and kind of stream of consciousness rambling,” she recalls, laughing. “Some of them were like, 30 second melodies and some were like, 15 minutes of me wailing weirdly. I think the second I discovered what music did for me and for my soul, I knew that it would be the biggest love of my life.

“I always appreciated my love for music, and appreciated that I had the ability to sing and write songs, but I kept it really, really, really private for years: the only people who knew about it were my best friend and my family, because they just heard me singing all the time in my room with the door closed.”

There is more to her sound than breathy late-night electronica, however. Songs such as You Should Know Where I'm Coming From use piano and strings beautifully, while Someone New's plucked acoustic guitar allows her magnificent, pliable vocals to take centre-stage. Formative influences included Lauryn Hill and Fiona Apple, while there are elements of 1990s r'n'b in her sound there, too – she has previously covered Aaliyah's Are You That Somebody and spoken of her love for acts such as Brandy. Even so, she is cautious of attributing too much credit to other artists.

“It’s funny, because sometimes when people talk about their influences, it means a certain thing – but I think there are different ways that people can influence you,” he says, thoughtfully. “For me, my music is such an internal process that I don’t think my sound is affected by any other person – unless I’m working with someone else, obviously. In terms of Fiona Apple and Lauryn Hill, they were huge inspirations to me because of their fearlessness. They put everything into their music and you can just really feel that.

“And I needed that when I first started writing; I needed a mentor to just push me into feeling that it was just OK to be everything that you are in your music: to be angry, to be fragile, to be scared, to be in love. Anything that I was feeling, I felt safe to do it after listening to people like Lauryn Hill and Fiona Apple, because they put everything in there. So when I talk about inspirations, it’s more coming from that angle.”

That fearlessness is there in her album. One of the most striking features of Goddess is Banks's intimate lyric-writing, from the fear of romantic rejection on Waiting Game to Alibi's vulnerable plea to "Please give me something to convince me that I am not a monster". Given her talent for tackling personal crises in an upfront manner, it comes as no surprise to learn that she has a degree in psychology under her belt.

“I love psychology and I love people; I mean, I always wanted to learn about the brain and how it develops,” she explains. “But it’s funny: throughout college, I remember that any second that I had free, it was music, music, music. It was serendipitous that my freshman year dorm was the only dorm that had this room downstairs, and it had this private piano. It was soundboarded, and it had a lock on the door. So any free time that I got during college – even when I was a senior – I would go to where my freshman dorm was and play the piano in that little locked room.

“So I was kind of learning about my brain and writing about my brain at the same time. Then when I met my manager, I felt like I was ready to put all of these diary entries, pretty much – documents of what I’ve gone through in my life – out in the world.”

She had begun tentatively committing songs to tape, but her big break came as something of a surprise when effusive antipodean DJ and presenter Zane Lowe happened across her song Before I Ever Met You on streaming site Soundcloud.

"I actually didn't even know that that song was out; there wasn't even one picture of me on the internet, or anything," she explains, laughing. "I went to my manager's house to discuss the first shoot that I'd be doing, and he was on Twitter, saying 'People are tweeting about Before I Ever Met You. Apparently Zane Lowe heard a private soundcloud link of Before I Ever Met You and he ripped it and played it on his radio show as the Next Hype Record. So everything from there felt very strange, because I had kept everything so quiet for so long.

“I remember feeling that I was just this little grain in a box, and I had all these songs and all these things that I’d been doing for years in this box. On the outside, it looked grey, but on the inside, it had all these colours in it. When things started happening, it felt like the box started to open.”

The album is a representation of “the biggest milestones” of her life from the last three years, she says, but she has been writing every day since it was completed. A stint in London last year proved eye-opening, and the contacts she’s made and collaborations that she’s undertaken have all proved influential.

“I’m itching to get back in the studio already,” she says. “It’s just a language for me. But I think the songs that I chose go together perfectly and represent me and who I am at the moment. That’s all that I wanted.”

Laying her “diary entries”, as she put it, out for the world to see must entail a certain level of exposure, but she is unfazed by the prospect. After all, this is the woman who put her own private phone number on Facebook in January 2013 and invited fans to “make connections outside of a computer screen” (there have been marriage proposals, multiple calls from prisoners, a few heavy breathers and everything in between). Yet when it comes to real connections, she is exceedingly happy to allow her album to do the talking.

“I’m definitely exposed, but not in a bad way,” she admits. “It’s like being exposed with metal around you, because music is the strongest centring force in my life. I’m exposing myself for myself, and for the people who have gone through similar things and can connect to it. With this album, I just think people will know who I am on such a personal level: me at my strongest, me at my most fragile, me at my spiciest. This album is just me in a nutshell. I don’t know if I want them to feel one particular thing when they listen to it. They’ll just feel me.”