Haim Sets Off on a Rampage
This month, Haim—a three-piece rock band from Los Angeles, featuring the sisters Danielle, Alana, and Este Haim—will release “I Quit,” its fourth album and a carnal, sure-footed rebuttal of the idea that our lives should orbit around some eternal romantic commitment. Haim has always been interested in the ways that relationships transform, burn out, or begin anew; the band’s best songs address all the clumsy and complicated intermediary feelings, that vast and chaotic stretch of road between “No, thanks” and “I do.” On “Now I’m in It,” a tense, pulsating single from the 2020 album “Women in Music Pt. III,” Danielle sings about the impossibility of the entire enterprise, how we move helplessly from being strangers to lovers and then back again, often obliterating ourselves along the way: “We cannot be friends / Cannot pretend / That it makes sense,” she chants, her voice high and breathless.
“I Quit,” which was co-produced by Danielle Haim and Rostam Batmanglij, is about submitting to the wild and mercurial whims of the universe—accepting that we can’t control when love comes, or when it goes. In a way, the album’s primary feeling is one of deep relief. Perhaps it takes breaking out of something to understand the myriad ways in which it was suffocating you. (Danielle was previously in a nearly decade-long relationship with Ariel Rechtshaid, a producer on the band’s first three albums.) On “Gone,” a quivering, spacey rock song that samples the ecstatic chorus of George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90”—Haim has never been particularly subtle—Danielle preaches liberation: “I’ll do whatever I want / I’ll see who I wanna see / I’ll fuck off whenever I want.” “Gone” features a spindly and unencumbered guitar solo. Over and over, Danielle makes the case for just leaving:
Haim is unusually good at pairing confessional lyrics with propulsive, playful rhythms, making unguarded music that also feels optimistic. My favorite track on the record, “Everybody’s Trying to Figure Me Out,” was co-written with Justin Vernon, of Bon Iver. It’s a rhythmically unpredictable song, with a dry and itchy snare sound—which is to say, it feels organically jittery, with just the right amount of “fuck it” thrown in. Periodically, Danielle’s voice goes raspy, a choice that’s consonant with the numerous allusions to cigarettes on “I Quit”; I caught myself replaying the bits where she inhales sharply and hungrily at the end of a line, like a smoker huddled in a doorway, fumbling with a matchbook before finally landing a flame. The song exists in a strange liminal period, the terrifying gap between the recent past and some unknowable future. Danielle’s vocals move from shouty to supple:
I like that verse, in part because the steadiness in her voice seems to capture something about the tension between desperately wanting to say “I knew it!” and recognizing that there’s no way to neutralize or declutter the past—at some point, the only thing a person can do is reorient and move on. The track reminds me, in both sound and vibe, of Modest Mouse’s “3rd Planet,” another tender and brambly song about trying not to lose your mind in the midst of a crisis (“Everything that keeps me together is falling apart,” the vocalist Isaac Brock sings). Deciding for yourself who you are and what you want—those themes could be corny, in a self-help, “I choose me!” sort of way, but here they feel profound, heavy, true. “There are things I’ve done I can’t deny / They might have saved my life,” Danielle sings.
In the closing minute of “Everybody’s Trying to Figure Me Out,” Haim gets very close to summing up both the tragedy and the miracle of heartache, which is, of course, that it’s surmountable:
There was a brief period during the making of “I Quit” when all three members of Haim were simultaneously single, an event that, in the band’s telling, felt charged and freaky, nearly celestial, a once-in-a-century planetary alignment. “We ended our relationships almost at the same time,” Este told me recently. “And then we all set off on this rampage, if you will.” A frothy, libidinous energy has been central to the album’s rollout. In May, the band posted a video to Instagram of Danielle doing a celebratory shimmy to Prince and the Revolution’s “Kiss,” a song about pleasure and control (“I want to be your fantasy, maybe you could be mine / You just leave it all up to me, we could have a good time,” Prince squeals). The caption was exultant: “D got some d.” When I spoke with the band, a few days later, it felt only proper to acknowledge the milestone: Congratulations, you got laid!
“I’m not gonna lie, I thought it’d be way sooner,” Danielle said, laughing. “I’ve been telling the world that I’m single since my birthday—and, like, not one person has slid into my D.M.s. Not one! I thought it’d be a big coming-out party: ‘I’m single, y’all!’ No.”
“I don’t get it,” Este said. She leaned in. “New Yorker readers: Shoot. Your. Shot. And that you can print.”
“This is a last-ditch effort,” Alana added. “This is it! If this doesn’t happen, it’s done! We quit!”
These days, both Danielle, thirty-six, and Alana, thirty-three, remain unattached; Este, thirty-nine, is engaged to Jonathan Levin, the C.E.O. of a tech company focussed on cryptocurrency analysis. “Rediscovery, self-discovery, those things kind of permeated the album,” Danielle said. “Being single at the same time also brought up a lot of nostalgia. We were listening to shit that we were listening to in high school, a lot of Cat Power, Animal Collective, Strokes. The stuff that we loved when we were teens, smoking in our cars.”
That feeling—of wanting to return to a simpler and more carefree era, when the stakes were lower and the future was wide open—is at the center of “Take Me Back,” a track about driving around Los Angeles, looking for a spot to kiss, doing drugs, wondering if your crush is ever going to make a move: “Take me back to ditching / Take me back to getting off,” Danielle sings. There’s an urgency to both the production and the songwriting on “I Quit” that seems to mirror the adolescent purity of that longing; some of the album’s most potent tracks, like “Try to Feel My Pain” (a song about accepting that something is going to be difficult and painful, and then doing it anyway), are less than three minutes long. “We finally stripped away a lot of . . . stuff,” Danielle said. “Rostam would say, ‘Sing softer.’ And I’d be, like, ‘Really?’ On ‘Try to Feel My Pain,’ I originally had kind of a Motowny delivery, and he was, like, ‘I have an idea. We’re gonna re-sing it, and you’re gonna have a handheld mike, and you’re just gonna whisper it.’ I was, like, ‘Mick Jagger wouldn’t have done that.’ And then it was ‘Oh, actually, Mick Jagger would have totally done that.’ ”
“That’s why you and Rostam work so well together,” Alana added. “Watching them produce together is so interesting. They bounce ideas off of each other so well, and it’s such a collaborative environment. Making an album should be fun. This album, we had so much fun. I think you can hear it.”
“Relationships,” the album’s first single, is another giddy, liberated song. On the chorus, Danielle sings, “Baby, how can I explain / When an innocent mistake turns into seventeen days?” Her voice sounds gently exasperated. “People take that lyric and think about it in different ways,” she said. “For me, it’s about when you get into a fight over something dumb. But I think people think of it as a seventeen-day situationship. Like a whole-ass relationship in seventeen days! But for me it was just ‘I hate being passive-aggressive. Can we just get over this?’ ”
There’s a deep well of exhaustion and ennui at the song’s core. “Don’t they end up all the same / When there’s no one left to blame?” Danielle wonders in the chorus. That question appears and reappears on “I Quit”: Are there only two ways love can go? Either you crash and burn, or you settle into a kind of grim and sexless codependency?
“Oh, my God,” Alana said, laughing.
“I mean, I still believe in love!” Este said. “But before this I was in a five-year relationship where we basically became roommates. That’s kind of what we’re talking about in the song—what do we do here? I can continue this way, probably forever, but I’m not gonna be happy, and I don’t think that it does anyone any good. It’s the hardest thing to do, because there’s nothing wrong. It was just that we’d become like friends.”
“I Quit” is full of hyperspecific references, which give it a satisfying temporality; the songs were written in the course of several years, but they feel immediate and cohesive, a snapshot of a particular moment of transition. “This album specifically was, like, no rules,” Alana said. “That’s kind of where the ethos of ‘I Quit’ came from: you just gotta put it all out there. Listening to Joni Mitchell, I felt so close to her, because I felt like I was living in her life. Being extremely vulnerable is actually really healthy, and there was an inner healing on this album—the idea was: If I get it out, it won’t stay in. There were a lot of wounds that were healed while making ‘I Quit.’ ”
“Down to Be Wrong,” another of the album’s best songs, is about refusing to commit to misery, even if it means disappointing someone else: “You’re the greatest pretender / So just keep pretending,” Danielle sings on a verse. Her voice is cool, with an overlay of vague disdain. She lets out an “Ooooh!” at the top of the chorus which contains a whole panoply of emotions: wounded, pissed off, euphoric. It is the sound of someone finally being set free. ♦
