- Columbia
- 2025
In the popular imagination, getting older is supposed to mean growing more confident and content, becoming a well-adjusted adult with their shit together and wisdom to dispense. Reality is more complicated. The longer life goes on, the harder and messier it seems to get — especially the art of preserving and nurturing your most important human connections. People drift apart due to busyness and unresolved alienation, or they're ripped apart instantly by explosive conflicts and grand betrayals. Romance can decay into boredom or a knotty tangle of resentments. No matter how hard you try to make some things work, they never seem to work — especially when the other party is maddeningly uninvested or stubbornly refuses to budge. You can end up feeling lost, lonely, and defeated in a way that's exacerbated by a culture that nudges each person into their own tech-addled isolation chamber. It's enough to make a person ruefully conclude, "Fuckin' relationships!"
This is what Danielle Haim exclaims repeatedly atop the hip-hop groove of "Relationships," the lead single from Haim's new album I quit. The sentiment is threaded throughout the whole project. Danielle and her sisters Este and Alana have become seasoned chroniclers of interpersonal politics and the exhaustion that so often proceeds from it. I quit is, in essence, an album about throwing up your hands and ceasing to put up with all that. It's possible that, as a man, I cannot fully appreciate songs that crystallize the frustrations of the modern woman. But as a fan of songwriting that gets at the heart of human experience, ensconced in stylish, adventurous production, I sure do appreciate these tracks anyhow.
Haim are not the same band that emerged in the 2010s. On their first two albums, they brimmed with a carefree swagger that, along with their enviable shaggy hair, made them feel like the embodiment of California cool. These three sisters were young, talented, and completely unbothered by anyone's objections to their approach. Marketed in part to an indie audience that had become infatuated with pop and R&B, the sisters blurred slick pan-genre festival music with soft rock and adult alternative sounds that had previously been critical anathema. They manned their instruments with scrunched-face passion, striking the time-honored arena-conquering poses, and they weren't shy about setting down those instruments to perform choreography — a seamless amalgamation of rock and pop stardom.
With 2020's Women In Music, Pt. III, they cracked open their sleek, sparkling music and let the insides come spilling out. The album captured a foggy emotional state that felt pitch perfect in a locked-down pandemic summer, a weariness matched by rawer, scrappier production filled with noisy outbursts and lo-fi flourishes. It marked a shift from Haim's more streamlined work with Ariel Rechtshaid, Danielle's longtime romantic partner, to recordings produced by Danielle and former Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij. The partnership with Rostam continues half a decade later on the similarly melancholic I quit; Haim say it is the sound of them becoming the band they've always wanted to be.
As on WIMPIII, the bleariness and exasperation at the heart of I quit does not always translate to a downcast, depressing tracks. They seem to be having a blast toying around with various styles, and many times the bad vibes become a stimulus for euphoric release. Haim have always been shapeshifters, capable of pulling in elements from various genres as it suits them. On these newer albums, that genre-jumping is less fluid and more pointedly patchwork. Dave Fridmann, who mixed a few songs last time around, applied his magic touch to almost everything this time, accentuating the slightly fried quality of the recordings. Also in the mix as co-writers here and there: Bon Iver's Justin Vernon, indie piano man turned Adele collaborator Tobias Jesso Jr., cult-favorite singer-songwriter Cass McCombs, and alt-pop producer Jack Hallenbeck.
I quit begins and ends with direct callbacks to the early '90s. Opener "Gone" punches up its crosshatch of fervent lo-fi strums with jubilant samples from George Michael's gospel-house anthem "Freedom '90," while closer "Now It's Time" interpolates the understated industrial beat and jarring chord blasts of U2's "Numb." These references triangulate a pop music era that has always loomed large in Haim's DNA -- recall the endless Wilson Phillips references they once inspired -- but they also feel like further expansions of the band's sonic universe. That exploratory spirit continues across the tracklist. The anxiously jangly "Take Me Back," the tender folk-rocker "The Farm," the moodily skittering "Million Years," the Wurlitzer and Hammond workout "Try To Feel My Pain," the roller-rink-ready synth-funk of "Spinning" — all feel like new permutations of this band, and all are fun excursions from the mean.
Anyone who's heard the advance singles already knows what's up. The immaculate "Relationships," perhaps Haim's purest dalliance with R&B, is crystalline and conversational. The midtempo guitar groove "Down To Be Wrong," a return to the band's longstanding Sheryl Crow influence, boasts a chorus so soaring that, in an interview at Primavera Sound this month, Katie Crutchfield named it the Song Of The Summer. "Everybody's Trying To Figure Me Out," one of the songs written with Justin Vernon, builds an anthem out of sighs and creeping rhythms. The songs are equally deft at teasing out the intricate push and pull necessary to preserve any meaningful bond for the long haul. "Oh, I bet you wish it could be easy to change my mind," Danielle belts out. "Oh, I bet you wish it could be easy, but it's not this time." Yet the album's best track might be the one that forgoes life's complications to celebrate simple desire. Like so many Haim songs, "All Over Me" sounds ready to dominate VH1 30 years ago. Fuzzy, propulsive, and threaded with Rostam's sitar(!), it's a booty call alchemized into pop-rock gold.
If Haim are struggling to find life's answers, they're becoming wise veterans in the recording studio. I quit peters out a bit near the end — the bluesy slow jam "Blood On The Street" probably could have been a B-side or bonus track — and I'm still not sure any one Haim song will ever surpass the effervescent perfection of "The Wire." But for an album with 15 tracks, the hit rate is remarkably high, and perfection seems counter to Haim's ethos these days anyway. There's a charmingly homespun quality to even the most produced moments here, as if we're hearing the fruit of gleeful experimentation in the lab. A lot of people have written off Haim's music as empty lifestyle product over the years. If you're still thinking of this band that way in 2025, let the lyrics of "Gone" be your rebuke: "You can hate me for what I am/ You can shame me for what I've done/ You can't make me disappear/ You never saw me for what I was."
I quit is out 6/20 on Columbia.
