One week later, Banks is sitting in the opulent downtown New York apartment of her new manager, Jeff Kwatinetz, a longtime industry mover who released the album on his boutique label Prospect Park Records. Monumental works of modern art line the walls, and Banks, drink in hand, seems entirely at ease. “Now we get to party,” she says, smiling. “I made all these fucking party songs, and I’m just like, ‘Come on, is it time to party yet?'”
Banks had a good reason to withhold any advance warning. “I didn’t really believe it was going to come out the day that my managers had told me,” she says. Like many fans, she felt burned by a long string of pushbacks over the past two years: “I’d get a date from the label, then it wouldn’t come out. You just feel stupid after a while.”
Back in January 2012, the rapper signed with Interscope and its British sibling Polydor in her first rush of success. But the relationship quickly soured, and by early this year – with her album complete but no sign of a release date – she was publicly begging the label to drop her. “It was really frustrating,” she says. “I prayed a lot, a lot, a lot to get off the label. I was like, ‘What the fuck am I breaking bread with these people for, when they’re all just playing with my career and lying in my face?'”