Album Review: Limerence by Jacob Banks
The word limerence is a 1977 psychiatric coinage for obsessive attachment, and Jacob Banks has made the rare love album that means the word clinically.
The psychologist Dorothy Tennov needed a word. In 1977 she was trying to name the exact thing that happens when one person takes up residence inside another person’s head without asking permission, the state in which the beloved becomes less a person than a condition you wake up inside, and she coined limerence to do the job. What the word names is the involuntary part of obsessive attachment, the part where you run circles in your mind praying for a bigger sign, the part where the object of your attention lives rent-free in the interior like a squatter who forgot the way out.
Forty-nine years after Tennov printed the term, it is also the title of the fifth studio album by Jacob Banks, a Nigerian-born, Birmingham-raised singer who moved to the UK at thirteen, took up music only after singing for the mourners at a close friend’s funeral in 2011, worked his way through three EPs on Interscope during the 2010s, released his major-label debut Village in 2018, and then in 2022 walked away from the system and founded his own imprint, Nobody Records, which has been his house ever since. The three-part Yonder series he built across 2024 and 2025 was an extended study of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sam Cooke, Al Green, and the spiritual music that raised all three. That study was also a retreat, in the sense that gospel was the water he ran back to after the industry had finished with him. Limerence is the first full-length he has made since going independent that does not belong to Yonder, and it is the first love record in that full span. He has come back to it with his hands fresh from three years of gospel, and with a word borrowed from a psychologist, since the one he used to reach for had stopped meaning the right thing.
Banks’ baritone is a gospel instrument, and it knows what to do with the word love. What the album hands its listener first is the title hook, repeated seven times in a row.
“Love will never make you feel like this.”
The entire argument of Limerence is already parked in the word this. This is the pronoun Banks fills in one track at a time over the next half-hour. Banks gives the diagnosis on the hook. He is telling whoever he is singing to that what they are experiencing is not love and should not be taken for love, and the throat telling them is the same throat that was working Al Green changes over Sister Rosetta Tharpe changes across the Yonder books all year last year. Nothing in the phrasing resembles a lover’s complaint or a heartbreak ballad. Banks reads it the way a doctor reads a chart aloud, with the patient already in the room knowing the answer.
One working-class pun runs “Easy Ain’t Home,” flipped from common speech into a diagnosis. Easy comes and easy goes, and easy is not a place a person can live. Over one of Banks’ own productions, slower and hornless, with a piano figure that could have been recorded at two in the morning in a house where everybody else is asleep, the song catalogs the mechanics of availability against self-interest.
“You only call me when it’s over
You know I’ll be over quickly in my Rover
‘Cause I’m a donor
And you could use a shoulder.”
Narrating his own compliance in the present tense, the speaker can see the whole shape of the arrangement clearly, and he is going to drive over anyway. He admits as much on “it’s so good to me, it’s still no good for me,” and the vocal around it stays low and unhurried, already past the warning label.
Three years of gospel study show up in the neologism. Banks reaches for whenever he tries to describe his own situation. It arrives clearest on “Claim to Fame,” which closes its final verse with a phrase that could have come straight out of any Baptist hymnal: we’ll be born again. The song wears the language of a hymn without becoming one. That phrase is simply the only one Banks has for what he means, so he uses it, and the subject of the rebirth is the woman on the receiving end of his attention. This is the Sam Cooke move, the Al Green move, the trick American soul music has been running on its audience since the 1950s. Devotional vocabulary comes out for a person, romantic vocabulary comes out for the divine, and the listener is trusted to hold both readings together in the same room. Banks’ baritone has been trained on that blur for most of a decade now, and Limerence gives him the room to point that vocabulary at one specific woman and watch it keep working.
At the center of the album, Banks comes closest to a fight by refusing the obvious action. “Who Made You King?” declines rescue. The Superman he calls out to has cast himself as king of second chances and king of understanding, and wants nothing to do with the coronation.
“Don’t catch me before I land
At worst, we lose our bed
At best, I’ll understand
Let me save myself
If you let me go through hell
You’ll be saving me.”
This is the rare love song that asks its listener to stop helping. It makes the request in a baritone that spiritual music has trained to know exactly how heavy a plea for self-destruction is allowed to get before it flips into its opposite. A second refusal arrives from the other side of the same relationship, this time in the vocabulary of a stage show. Banks’ anecdotist is still performing the arrangement after the curtain has fallen for an audience that is not coming back, putting numbers on the board, staying on the silver screen for everybody to see. Harold “HB” Brown produces the song (the album’s only fully outside production besides the flip), and his arrangement rides a churchy piano, the kind of piano that has accompanied a thousand long Sundays. A confession arrives in the bridge, “I’m broken in two from holding on to you,” compressing the whole album into few words, and Banks has done the math already and chosen the wrong answer on purpose.
Banks produces most of Limerence himself. Only the stage-show song (credited to Harold “HB” Brown) and the “Love Like This” flip (credited to PRGRSHN) are fully farmed out; every other track lists him as producer or co-producer. He has put three years into gospel studies, working around arrangements that know how to stay out of a good singer’s way, and he is now making those arrangements for his own voice. Limerence plays as a gospel-weathered soul record cut in a space small enough that the room is audible. Hammond organ pads do most of the harmonic work, the snares are buried deep in the reverb, and backing vocals step up from underneath the lead on the hook and step back down on the verse. And the record turns out distinctive in its details and cohesive as a whole, with nothing in the arrangements getting in the way of his baritone. Once the flip arrives, PRGRSHN’s version opens the song up, brings NESTA in on the feature, and sends that same earlier diagnostic sentence back out from a different room, addressed to a different person.
The word limerence has been having a quiet decade on the internet. Therapy Instagram found it around 2020, the relationship-advice wing of TikTok picked it up a few years later, and by the middle of the 2020s it had become the shorthand a certain kind of listener reaches for whenever a crush starts hurting. A soul singer in 2026 putting that word on his album cover is aiming at an audience who already knows what it means and has already tried to figure out whether what they are inside of is the real thing or the condition. Banks will probably find them. And the songs are strong, while the baritone singing them knows how to carry a diagnosis the way the Baptist church carries a hymn.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “In the End,” “Who Made You King?,” “Easy Ain’t Home”