FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: HAIM — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: David Brandon Geeting for GQ

HAIM

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EVEN if…

IN THIS PHOTO: Morgan Maher for i-D

I have written about HAIM a few times recently, there is good reason to come back to them. I am writing this ahead of their new album, I quit, being released. HAIM are also rumoured to play Glastonbury. His secret set. It is an exciting time for them. For this Modern-Day Queens is an opportunity shine new light on this amazing group. I am going to start out with GQ and their interview from earlier in the month:

“The album came after a period of change for the three band members. Having returned from a euphoric post-pandemic tour, they found themselves all single again at the same time, with Danielle (36, middle Haim, lead vocals, drums, guitar) having split up with the band’s longtime co-producer Ariel Rechtshaid in early 2022 after nine years together. (I Quit is their first album without Rechtshaid, who does however have a co-writing credit on “Relationships”, which the band first started working on in 2017.)

“All of our songs are about our collective trauma and going through it,” Alana says. “A lot of our last album was us grappling with going to therapy for the first time and these emotions that had been bottled up for so many years, and I think with this album, we’ve done the work on ourselves, and now it’s time to party.”

It’s this stage of their lives that Danielle sings about on “Relationships”, the summery, post-break-up catharsis anthem – a time in which they were drifting in and out of flings, though Este (39, eldest Haim, bass guitar, backing vocals) would meet her now-fiancé after not too long. “I’ve been single for the last three years,” Danielle says. “It’s been so fun.” And it does sound fun: after the break-up, Danielle moved into Alana’s house. To give you an insight into the vibe: “I have a beer fridge,” Alana says. “I’m like a frat boy trapped in a girl’s body.”

During this time, she says, “My house turned into fuckin’ Animal House. Growing up, we were not the cool house. We didn’t have good snacks. My therapist calls it ‘a corrective experience’. So it was like, at my house, it’s gonna be ragers…”

The weekly house parties were all well and good – until, one weekend, Danielle was ill. “Alana was like, ‘I think I’m gonna have a few people over,’” says Danielle.

“I was like, ‘Just shut your room,’” says Alana.

“Literally, like smelling the cigarettes…” says Danielle.

“Danielle was like, ‘Can you guys stop smoking inside?’” Alana says. “I put an air purifier in her room. I think we partied ’til five in the morning.”

“And I was like, ‘What the fuck…’” Danielle says.

“Danielle moved out,” says Alana. And that was pretty much the end of that.

n social media, Haim are a record label’s dream – naturally funny, authentically themselves. “We’ve been performing as a trio and doing shows in our back yard since we were kids,” says Este.

“Este would do physical comedy to make me laugh as a baby,” Alana explains. “She would, like, trip and fall and I would laugh, and that was just our whole lives. Being on TikTok is just an extension of that. It comes naturally. And like, why not?” During their childhood they were obsessed with Saturday Night Live, and looked up to cast members like Cheri Oteri, Molly Shannon and Maya Rudolph. “We look at every TikTok as an SNL sketch – how do you make people laugh in 30 seconds?” Alana says. That they’re unafraid to be goofy is a key part of the band’s charm.

We talk about a viral clip of them performing the dance from their “I Know Alone” video live on stage. It’s an endearingly unserious – but not simple – dance, with lots of arm-swinging and knee-wiggling. Alana believes that some people miss that they’re taking the piss more often than not. “That’s where it gets lost in the sauce with people,” she says.

“Even though we’re a rock band, we love movement,” says Danielle.

“Prince danced,” says Este.

“I mean, Talking Heads – movement,” says Alana.

I sense this is a conversation they’ve had before, or at least it’s something that has bothered them before now. “It’s such an important part for us,” Danielle says, “I don’t know if the rock community…”

“Takes that as a weakness,” Alana says. “I don’t know why.”

The rock community has loomed as a spectre of disapproval throughout the past decade-and-change of their career. The beef has taken different shapes and sizes – one day it’s Portishead’s Geoff Barrow talking shit about them on Twitter (he only stopped after a 21-year-old Alana, who calls herself “the bulldog” of the family, confronted him about it at a music festival). The next it’s commenters under their live performance videos – “It’s always a guy,” Este says – who say that they’re not playing live because their guitars are not plugged in. “It’s like, my dog, we’re playing with wireless,” says Danielle. “Are you a fucking idiot?” These are the men – and yes, it is largely men – to whom they’re saying fuck off, we don’t need your approval on I Quit.

And another thing… Did you know that Haim have never had commercial radio success in the United States? It’s a matter that understandably confounds them to this day.

“We’re so lucky that we have incredible fans that have always supported us – like, we’ve never needed radio,” says Alana. “Alternative fucking rock fucking radio… You can tell how much I fucking love them.”

“For some reason, people that need to put people in boxes don’t get us,” says Danielle.

“It goes back to what we said,” says Alana. “We love to dance and we love to make people laugh, and for some reason that’s a no-go.”

“I think it’s all quite antiquated,” says Este. “The whole setup is... who gives a shit about that? It’s really old school. We quit caring about that shit”.

We might get some repeated information in these interviews. I do feel it is important to highlight brilliant chats with the HAIM sisters. I am moving to i-D and their recent interview. I love the interaction between HAIM during interviews. Learning about the period between the release of Women in Music Pt. III. It seems like the creative period for I quit was a lot smooth and harmonious. I think that the album will sit alongside the best of this year. One of the absolute best bands in the world. I wonder why they were not afforded a Glastonbury headline spot. With an absence of women headlining the Pyramid Stage, it would have been great having the likes of HAIM headline:

“Hey kid, wanna hear a horror story? Alana Haim has some crazy ones. All three Haim sisters do, actually: Over the past 20-odd years, they’ve dated their fair share of creeps, weirdos, and losers. One song on their fourth album—whose pithy, merch-ready title has to be withheld for now—is called “Take Me Back,” and it serves as a rose-tinted eulogy to all those crazy, unusual, or downright terrible lost loves. Such as: The time Alana tried to hook up with a guy she had the “biggest fucking crush on,” only for him to end up embarrassed and her to end up in need of a tetanus shot.

“You know that feeling when you’ve seen this person forever, and they don’t notice you, and then, you know, it’s on? I saw him from across the room—I was like ‘Oh my God, he’s never noticed me in my life’—and now he’s noticing me,” Alana says, gesticulating wildly. We’re crammed into a booth in Casa Vega, a “special occasion” Mexican restaurant the three went to as kids growing up in the valley, and now that Alana has had half a Corona, “I’m like, let me tell you everything.”

“We went back to his house, and we were lying on his bed. And when he tried to get on top of me, he farted. Full fart. Not a cute, like, under the radar fart—it was like, full fart,” she says, half amused, half mortified. (Danielle and Este, like a built in Greek chorus, offer murmurs of “Oh, God.”) “I was like, you know what? That’s cool. No shaming of farts, like go off. But then I think he got embarrassed, and he was just like, ‘Maybe we should go to bed.’ And I was like, ‘Whatever you feel’.”

So far, fairly normal, as far as dating stories go. But she’s not done. “His dog had come in at that point, and jumped on the bed. It was like, a tiny bed, and he had like, a big dog, not a cute little lap dog, he had a dog,” she continues, with the curt, matter-of-fact style of a journalist in a ’90s rom-com. “And in the middle of the night, it had jumped on the bed and nuzzled between me and the guy. So I guess I started spooning this dog by accident. I didn’t know the dog was there. I guess I twitch in my sleep because I’m a very active dreamer, so I think I did a movement, and the dog got so scared that it woke up and it bit my nose.

“It started bleeding, but I’m such a people pleaser, and I’m so embarrassed that I was like ‘It’s totally fine.’ I’m like gushing blood, cleaning myself up, don’t leave, and am like ‘Let’s just go back to bed’,” she says, hitting the gruesome ordeal’s beats with timing that suggest she’s told this one many times over. “I wake up in the morning and… how it was on. I was like, ‘We’re never gonna see each other again!’”

You could see that story as a warning about the horrors of swimming through the dating pool—I certainly did—but Alana wears it as a badge of honor. The fourth Haim album is a celebration of total freedom: to be by yourself, to make your own choices and, sometimes, to stay at a hookup’s place after you get farted on and, later, bitten. The tenuous middleground between breaking up and staying together has always been a favored topic for Alana, Danielle, and Este, and there’s certainly some of that here—lead single “Relationships,” released today, is about the torturous feeling of knowing you should break up but not wanting to. This time around, there’s also the crackling, almost adolescent messiness of single life mixed in

This new spirit has spread, maybe, into the way they’re talking about the music. Crammed into a booth in the back of the chintzy, low-lit restaurantDanielle, 36, in a black shirt, Alana, 33, in a baby-blue waistcoat, Este, 39, quiet between them in a cream knit and orange-tinted aviators—they seem animated and forthcoming, more willing to talk in specifics about the real-life inspirations behind the songs.

After the release of 2020’s Women In Music Part III—the band’s best, most acclaimed album ever, and their first to be nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys—Danielle broke up with her longtime boyfriend and the band’s longtime producer, Ariel Rechtshaid. Haim 4 is the first album they’ve done without his involvement and, for the first time since 2011, Danielle found herself single. “I’m a serial monogamist–in high school, I was always wanting a boyfriend and I didn’t have one. All I wanted was for someone to ask me to prom, and no one did,” she says. After that, all she did was get into long-term relationships; “Being single now, I’m just trying to embrace it, because I’m… I feel like I’m the age where I need to embrace it,” she says, with a wry laugh.

PHOTO CREDIT: Lea Garn

“Relationships” finds Haim tapping back into the slick ’90s R&B sounds that they explored on their second album, 2017’s Something To Tell You—and, fittingly, it was written in 2017, as the first song for Women In Music, on a plane in Australia. Danielle, the band’s primary songwriter and co-producer, always had “some weird thing in my head that was like ‘You need to finish this.’” When this album,with its stories of heartbreak, weird mishaps, and avowed singledom, started to coalesce, it became clear that the track was about to have its time. Working with Rostam, another longtime collaborator, the band tried to “write songs like the Chili Peppers,” says Rostam over the phone—just getting into the room together and working stuff out live—and began to blend the raw, immediate feeling of Women In Music with the high-sheen qualities of their past records. “It was pretty freeing to just be in the room with an acoustic guitar, a bunch of acoustic guitars, and just drums,” says Este.

After Women In Music, the band started to feel like “totally different people,” says Alana, in part because Danielle moved in with her during the recording process for its follow-up, recreating the kind of family living situation they hadn’t experienced since Alana was 16. “Imagine, we’re both in our 30s, and we’re living together again. It was like, super fun to be like, dating, and having to be like to a dude ‘You should come back to my house’ and then having to remember ‘But, oh my god, I’m so sorry, my sister lives with me,’” she says. “I kind of saw what Danielle was going through, making an album – the work never really left, which was kind of inspiring.”

Alana describes this record as “the closest we’ve ever gotten to how we wanted to sound,” and says that it was a “completely different experience” recording this time around. As for the reason why, says Danielle: “Glaringly, this part’s a little hard for me to talk about, but we weren’t working with”—she lowers her voice and shrugs a little—”Ariel. There’s a lot to unpack there, but yeah. Working with Rostam, in general it’s very quick, kinetic with him, which I really love as an artist,” she says. “Maybe before, it wasn’t that way, it was kind of a more… longer, searching, labored situation”.

I am finishing off with a feature from DIY from this month. By the time this is out, there will be more reviews and excitement around I quit. It is going to be this huge and remarkable album. I have seen reviews already and it is going to be a hugely interesting and memorable listening experience:

“If there was ever any doubt about this early bond, the band have since collected a whole host of accolades to prove it: one BRIT Award, two Glastonbury Pyramid slots, three acclaimed studio albums (one of which saw them collaborate with megastar Taylor Swift), and four Grammy nominations, to name just a few bucket-list ticks. Despite all these accomplishments, though, the sisters are astonishingly down to earth, kept grounded by each other.

That’s been essential for surviving over a decade in an infamously fickle music industry. Originally forming in 2007, HAIM launched in 2012 with their anthemic single ‘Don’t Save Me’. It wasn’t long before they attracted attention for their genre-bending, instrument-swapping, harmony-driven, bass-face-making, fun-loving, familial approach to music - one that sits somewhere between Shania Twain and Bruce Springsteen. Unbound to a certain sound, the band’s music spans folk, country, pop, rock, electro, alt and R&B. Backing them is an onslaught of adoring fans, obsessed with their dance routines, irreverent attitude, and that enviable sisterly bond - one that seems to stretch right off stage and engulf anyone around into the HAIM family.

It’s first thing in the morning in California, and the band - who are currently in the middle of five rehearsal days - are nursing “bangovers”, a term they’ve coined for their post-practice exhaustion. Este is taking the call lying down, apparently suffering from a bad back caused by all the commotion that a HAIM rehearsal demands. It’s no surprise, really: they’re now in full swing preparing for the release and subsequent tour of their highly-anticipated new album, ‘I quit’.

“This record felt like an exhale,” says Danielle. “We could finally take a little bit of a breath. We made it this far, we’re doing something right!” she says with a humble smile. The trio’s refusal to assign themselves to any genre is evidenced wholly on the new record, which defies any pigeon-holing by bouncing between joyful pop, American rock and everything in between. “We’ve never really played by any rules music wise - even when we were kids,” says Alana. “We’ve always just been striving for the sound that’s been in our brains.”

That wasn’t always the case though; the band have definitely felt pressure to define themselves in the past. “We started to get in our heads about that,” says Danielle, recalling the early days when they would get feedback from “people in positions”. “We’d be like, ‘shit, do we need to put another guitar solo in this song so people think we’re a band?’.” Alana remembers it too: “People have been trying to put us in a box since our first album; they’re like, ‘where do you fit?’. But now on record number four, the sisters have officially shed any people-pleasing skin, armed by the confidence that success has afforded them. “With this album we really didn’t think about that, we just don’t give a fuck!”

And that shows. The 15-track album, co-produced by Danielle and long-time collaborator Rostam Batmanglij, is a euphoric, sunshine-soaked burst of energy. It feels fresh and new while remaining distinctly HAIM; there’s juicy guitar solos, hooky harmonies, and surprise harmonicas - what more could you want? The record glows with alleviated perspective, one that only comes on the other side of pain. It has a distinct relief to it, like a weight has been lifted. “It started when all three of us found ourselves single at the same time, for the first time,” says Danielle. It was also the first time the band had worked without Ariel Rechtshaid, the singer’s ex-partner and long-time producer of the band, with whom she had split before the making of the record.

Despite the change, it was apparently a breeze to make - a far cry from 2021’s ‘Women in Music Part III’, when the band had brains like “scrambled eggs”. “We were in a completely different state of mind [for our last album],” recalls Alana. “There was a lot of anxiety, stress, and it all just felt uneasy.” On the contrary, this new record sees the band - quite literally - quit their troubles. “There was just this lightness to being in the studio,” she reflects. “We were very much together again - single - and there was laughter, dancing and running around!” As a band who relish gigging, they couldn’t be more excited to take this energy on the road. “We make albums to tour, and this one feels like it’s gonna be the best tour of all time, because we just had so much fun making it!”

During the making of the record, Danielle moved in with Alana. “I would wake up in the morning to Danielle blasting some sort of GarageBand beat on speakers and I was like, ‘that’s fire, but I’m trying to sleep!’” laughs Alana, reenacting the scenario. The sisters still use the exact same process as they did in the early days. “As a songwriter it’s really stifling to be like, ‘I’m gonna write a full song today’. I think for us, it’s always just been about not putting too much pressure on yourself,” says Danielle of their foolproof technique. “Sit down, just write a part, just write a thing, just write one melody that you like, throw spaghetti at the wall!”

But despite ‘Relationships’ initially arriving so quickly, it took a lot of wasted pasta for it to finally come to full fruition. When HAIM tried to record the song, it just never quite fit. “It was the thorn in our side, but also as three sisters we knew there was something to it,” explains Danielle. Looking back, the group thinks it was meant to be that way. “It’s funny how the universe works,” says Alana. “Somebody up there knew this one wasn’t supposed to be on that album and they put every sort of roadblock in front of it so we couldn’t finish it.” But the song refused to quit, and when it came to the new album, ‘Relationships’ resurfaced. “It took seven years to get to that point and then it [got] finished really quickly,” says Danielle. “Somebody in the universe was like, ‘hold on, babes’,” says Alana before being interrupted by her sister. “We’re talking a lot about spirits,” Danielle laughs, “that’s a very LA thing.” “Well, you know what, I’m from LA, so fuck it!” Alana retorts.

This fourth outing isn’t all owing to the forces that be; rather, the sisters put all of themselves into the ‘I quit’ story. The record is their most vulnerable and open yet, with self-discovery at the front and centre. “We’ve just grown so much and we had the courage to be extremely vulnerable on this record,” says Alana. “We’re talking about one night stands, fucking around, being in your head, having fun, falling in love, and also thinking ‘what the fuck is going on?’… my parents are gonna love this album!” she grimaces, almost realising as she speaks that they’ll hear all of the above.

Despite their devotion to courage, they’re only human, and mental health doesn’t discriminate. “I struggle with anxiety, so it’s not like you can just shut that off and it’s gone forever,” admits Danielle. “Sometimes I get in my head about how I present myself to the world, even in very niche or small social interactions,” she pauses for a moment, “but I can’t live my life just always being in my head and worrying if people are gonna think a certain way about me.” This relatable fear is addressed on ‘Everybody’s trying to figure mme out’ - one of HAIM’s most exposed songs yet. “You think you’re going to die, but you’re not going to die,” Danielle repeats on the song. “I’ve just used it as a mantra for myself,” she explains. There’s these moments where you’re like, ‘fuck, how am I gonna get through this?’” Alana relates: “Like when you’re having a panic attack and you’re reminding yourself ‘this will pass and I’m not gonna die from this. I just need to take a second and come into my own’.”

But how have they got to this point? Alana, who refers to herself a “classic overthinker” admits she relies on her siblings to abate her worries. “It’s a group effort, and I think that you really need good people around you to not have that fear, to not overthink. Right before I go to bed, I’ll call one of my sisters and literally trauma dump - then I feel better, but I’ll give my trauma to them,” she laughs a little self-consciously, before gathering her thoughts. “I’m really lucky - it’s really nice to have two siblings that allow me to do that. They’ll constantly remind me, ‘don’t have fear, don’t overthink, just keep the vibes up, keep it going - it’s single summer!’”.

Rolling Stone U.K. wrote how I quit could be the soundtrack of the summer. One of the most exciting albums of the year, it has the potential to dominate. It would be great if HAIM are playing Glastonbury. We shall see! Go and follow them and order I quit. One of the most remarkably consistent groups of their generation, they will keep on putting up excellent music. I am interested to see where their sound takes them next. On the basis of what we have heard from I quit, this group keeps…