How Haim Quit Caring About All That

In the Valley with Haim, nothing can throw you off your—

Suddenly, a car pulls out in front of the sisters, who are walking in a line like they do in all their music videos (as Alana had told me earlier, “We’re really fucking good at walking”). “Sorry, we’re walking, sorry!” she says now to the driver, aware that she was a whisker away from making the news: “I get killed in the Valley… What a way to go!” We’re on course for the alley where they shot part of the “Summer Girl” video—you know, the one where they gradually shed layers and layers of clothes. “The last shot of the video is us walking right here,” Alana says, stopping outside a Barnes & Noble that sits under a retro cinema marquee. “Haim lore!”

Haim is showing me around the Valley not just because they love it—though they do love it—but because the nostalgia we’re tapping into by roaming these streets inspired parts of their upcoming fourth album, I Quit. For example, the Valley is responsible for this spit-take of a lyric, on a very autobiographical song about their high-school days called “Take Me Back:” “Molly took a shit in the back of the truck, didn’t even notice, she was too coked up.”

“That really happened,” Este says. (They did, however, change the name to protect the privacy of this former schoolmate of theirs.)

Written and recorded over the last three years, I Quit was born out of a newfound self-assuredness that set in around the 10th anniversary of their 2013 debut Days Are Gone. “I feel like sometimes you cringe at [old] songs, but with that album I still hold it and I’m so proud of it,” says Alana. “I could look back at every single one of our albums and go, Fuck, so many people were like ‘Don’t do that’, ‘Don’t do that’, and we always stuck to our guns,” Alana says. “Now we’re just like, ‘Fuck off. If you’re not gonna believe in us, we can believe in ourselves. Fuck off!’”

Over the course of a day together, it becomes clear that there are a handful of targets for that fuck off: the rock music old guard that has patronized them for much of their career, the misogynists that question their musical abilities, and, yes, their exes (more on that later). No, it’s not a coincidence that it’s mostly men.

But it’s not as angsty as that sounds—I Quit is about a sense of release, or an “exhale,” as Danielle refers to it. It’s the post-quitting high, rather than relitigating the shit that led to the quitting. The greatest indicator of this feeling is a sample of George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90” on the first track “Gone,” which is just about peak Haim—joyous, knowingly corny, weirdly moving all in one.

“We never wanted [the title] to be a negative,” Alana says. “When we say ‘I quit’, it’s like, ‘I quit the things that don’t serve me.’ And it’s really amazing, ’cause quitting is a new beginning.”