Danielle Haim is in the middle of explaining her songwriting process when she’s interrupted by a call on her hotel phone. “One second,” she says.
Luckily, her siblings Alana and Este, who round out the band Haim, are there to fill the void, performing a rapid-fire riff—a sister act, if you will.
“You have a caller! Who is it?” Alana asks.
“Is it mom?” Este wonders.
“It’s probably mom,” Alana concludes.
The trio have always been close, but their synchronicity has never been more apparent than on their fourth studio album, I Quit, out today. On its face, the record—coproduced by Danielle and Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of Vampire Weekend—is a breakup album. Over its 15 tracks, the record travels from the lusty beginnings of a romance to the grief of its dissolution and the catharsis of finding closure. But present throughout is a sense of ecstasy: in album opener “Gone”—with its sample from George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90”—and the jubilant, Alana-led “Spinning,” all the way through to the percussive closer, “Now It’s Time.”
“I wish I could tell you there was some huge blowup with my past relationship. The real story is just two people that lost each other,” Danielle says of her split from Ariel Rechtshaid, who produced the band’s three previous albums. “There’s a lot of love there. I think we made really great music with my ex, and he’s such a genius producer, but I think I really found so much strength in producing this with Rostam. I really feel like it’s our best work.”
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The group began working on I Quit shortly after Danielle’s breakup, when she moved in with Alana—a moment recounted on the balladic “The Farm.” It was the first time in over a decade that all three siblings were single at the same time. (Since then, Este has become engaged to tech entrepreneur Jonathan Levin.) “We were writing about where we were in that exact moment,” Danielle says. “I think it was about self-discovery for me and realizing who I was in that moment. I found a lot of power in that.”
“The songwriting was the easy part. I think the living together, for me, was the hard part,” Alana admits. “We haven’t lived together since I was 16.” In time, however, the arrangement worked its magic. “We were brought back into this nostalgic zone, going out to bars together, going out to parties together,” Alana goes on. “There were no plus-ones.”
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Indeed, nostalgia takes a front seat on the record. The Haims grew up in the Valley Village neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley, a setting that informs much of I Quit—from the references to specific streets (the main drag, Ventura Boulevard, gets a shoutout, as does the residential Kling Street, where Alana’s best friend lived) to the album cover, shot by fellow Valley denizen Paul Thomas Anderson.
Growing up in close proximity to Los Angeles’s storied music venues was another intractable part of their youth. Este, who worked in a restaurant, would comb through its stash of lost or confiscated IDs, searching for suitable fakes for her and her sisters. “Este found me an ID, but I was 15 and [the woman] was 27. I fully had braces,” Alana recalls. “I only used it to buy alcohol once, and I was, like, I can’t do this. It’s too much pressure.” Getting into 21+ shows at the Troubadour, where headliners played to 200-person crowds, was more her speed.
“It felt like the world was our oyster,” Este reflects. “Fast forward 10, 15 years, and we were weirdly in the same place again. We’re all single. We don’t have to answer to anyone, and we can just focus on us and the music.”
A similar attitude has fueled the album’s promotion. On social media, they’ve called out men’s bad behavior, embraced a louche sense of sexuality, and called out misogynists who question their abilities as musicians. The latter is a topic they also explored on their previous album, Women in Music Pt. III. “Am I going to sit here and say the things that we wrote about on our last album just stopped after we wrote about it? No, but we made a whole album about it,” Danielle says. “Now it’s time to…” Alana interjects: “Have fun!”
One song on I Quit was originally meant for WIMPIII: the poppy lead single, “Relationships,” with its simple yet eviscerating lyrics like, “Why do I have a guilty conscience? / I’ve always been averse to conflict / But you really fucked with my confidence.” The group had been tinkering with it for seven years—ever since Danielle began writing it on a plane to Australia—but they could never quite get it right, and people close to them wrote it off. (They compare it to other “problem children” turned hits like “The Wire,” from Days Are Gone, and “Want You Back,” from Something to Tell You.) “We just held such a huge, huge, huge feeling about it,” Danielle says.
Now, they see their struggle to crack “Relationships” as a kind of sign. “A lot of people didn’t understand the song, and we really believed in it,” Alana says. “Now, in hindsight, ‘Relationships’ was never supposed to be on Women in Music. Maybe it was like the universe being, like, ‘Hold.’”
