On ‘I Quit,’ Haim Sounds More Like Indie Rock Than Pop

In March, Haim released “Relationships,” the first single from their new album I Quit finally out this week. Upon first listen, it sounded like a song that had already been soundtracking check-ins at Ace Hotel locations for a decade. It was sleek yet soulful, bouncy but impactful, feathery light with a melancholy undertow, and impossible to keep out of the part of your brain that houses earworms. It was, in short, a quintessential Haim track.

That is, unless you were paying close attention to the lyrics. Over an old-school hip-hop drum loop and soft-rock keyboards, Danielle Haim relates in a slippery R&B croon a series of complaints about a failed romantic union. “You really fucked with my confidence,” she sings. It’s a small but significant needle-scratch moment — not because of the F-bomb, which is hardly uncharacteristic for this amiably outspoken sister trio. What’s striking is the admission of non-self-assurance. Haim, if nothing else, has never been lacking in personal conviction. From the fearless amalgam of Hot 100 aesthetics and classic-rock formalism on their 2013 debut Days Are Gone to the doubling-down on their most Shania Twain-like aspects on 2017’s Something To Tell You to the raw pop deconstructions of 2020’s Women In Music Pt. III, Haim normally strikes a posture of absolute artistic resolve.

Depending on your point of view, this might be a good thing (you always feel like you’re in good, capable hands with this band) or a bad thing (see the previous joke about the Ace Hotel). Personally, I lean toward the former about 70 percent of the time, and the latter the remaining 30 percent. I can marvel at how ingeniously their records are put together and also chafe against how, well, perfect everything is. For detractors, their indestructible sheen can make Haim feel more like a brand than a band, with songs that exude vibes rather than excavate genuine feeling. Women In Music Pt. III, deliberately or not, felt like a remedy to that criticism, roughing up their polished edges while playing up the sadness behind their unflappably sunny demeanor. Whereas Tango In The Night was a north star for the earlier records, Women In Music Pt. III was more in a Tusk vein, all handmade soundscapes and overt anxiety.

Now comes I Quit, which pushes even further in the direction of messiness, both musical and emotional. Dave Fridmann, the iconic indie producer and studio engineer best known for his work with Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev, mixed every song on the album, an expansion of his limited role on the previous two Haim records. Fans of The Soft Bulletin and other Fridmann productions will recognize the heavy, blown-out drum sounds and the wiry aftertaste left by the guitars, which are slightly less pronounced here but still palatable. (Even “Relationships,” which includes a drum break seemingly inspired by “Billie Jean.”)

But I Quit sounds fried in other ways. The opening track “Gone” is stripped-down, almost like a demo, until a surprising sample from George Michael’s “Freedom 90” floats in along with a skronky guitar solo that sounds borrowed from an early Ween record. Reactions to the song have been mixed — Is the sample too obvious? Does the guitar solo work? — but what’s undeniable is that Haim is actively subverting and flat-out screwing around with their otherwise reliable pop melodies. The same is true of “All Over Me,” a stomping folk-rocker affected with a slight warble that sounds like a blockbuster ’80s album playing on a dying Walkman, or “Everybody’s Trying To Figure Me Out,” a moody minor-key number co-written with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon that evokes, of all bands, Modest Mouse. It’s a fascinating development for a group that helped to move indie rock toward the pop mainstream in the early 2010s. Now, in the middle of a new decade, Haim sure sounds a lot like a pre-Days Are Gone indie-rock band.

If you know anything about I Quit other than what I have just told you, you are certainly aware that it has been described as a “breakup album.” The breakup in question involves Danielle Haim (the group’s de-facto leader and most dominant musical force) and Ariel Rechtshaid (the co-producer of their first three albums). Which, I suppose, makes I Quit Haim’s Rumours, though the conversation in this case is one-sided. The recurring theme of the album is best summed up with a line from the penultimate track, a piano ballad in the mode of Tumbleweed Connection called “Blood On The Street”: “And I can count on one hand / All the times that you really made me feel free.”

Here, again, I’m put in an awkward position. As a music critic, I am inclined by my profession to play armchair psychiatrist and make a self-evident connection between the relatively shambolic nature of the music on I Quit with the repeated lyrical claims about feeling stifled in a failed relationship. Listening to this album feels like visiting a newly single friend’s apartment, where they have rearranged all the pictures on the wall and placed the furniture around the room in a less symmetrical fashion as a silent rebellion against an overly controlling ex. The angst in the words translates to the bumpiness in the grooves. Though, it should be noted, I don’t know any of these people and I could be wrong about that.

What can I say without reservation is that this is the least careful Haim album yet, in ways that I like and in ways that I don’t. Bad news first: I Quit, at 15 songs, is at least three tracks too long. Most of those come in the middle of the record, where things get a little too mid-tempo and same-y. (Thinking specifically of decent but forgettable songs like “Love You Right” and “The Farm.”) Things pick up after that when Haim (with assistance from longtime collaborator and co-producer Rostam Batmanglij) lean into their natural eclecticism, with tangents into Ray Of Light-style dance pop (“Million Years”) and funky ’70s southern soul (“Try To Feel My Pain”).

And then there’s the battiest number on the album, which pulls an even more shocking and unlikely sample than “Freedom 90.” It’s called “Now It’s Time,” and it’s the last song on I Quit, perhaps because Haim felt like they had to run off after dropping a track that interpolates heavily from “Numb,” the oddball “hit” from U2’s 1993 album Zooropa. The industrial rock track with the stuttering beat was a major curveball from the Irish stadium-rock band 30 years ago, who were in the midst of their own chaotic period. But it’s even weirder coming from Haim, who typically have more fashionable tastes when it comes to music curation.

Given that Lil Wayne recently collaborated with Bono, maybe some sort of “unforgettable fire” has been sparked in pop culture this year. Or maybe sampling from Zooropa is what freedom truly sounds like. Either way, I welcome this newly liberated, and refreshingly unstable, era of Haim.