I’ve long had a soft spot for Haim, but against my better judgement, because there’s something of the stroppy, obscenely privileged and entitled aura of college-educated third wave feminism about them. Their songs narrate the lives of dissolute 20-something young women in Western conurbations – careening around like pinballs in a flipper game, getting tattoos, waking up drunk in random stranger’s beds, crying hysterically over some recently departed Chad, or scoffing at some try-hard Beta. Of course, this “new woman” malarky (wasn’t it already new in the Weimar Republic?) represents an immense psychosocial provocation to my small-dick-energy-emitting masculine fragility, but that’s not the point; my gripe is historical-materialist rather than gender-based, because after all, the Strokes essayed a similar live-fast-but-don’t-die-young-because-daddy-will-bail-us-out-in-the-end conceit, and I found their studied turn-of-the-century indifference every bit as risible as Haim’s tiresome Brat Summer schtick.
Maybe I just don’t like young people. But I digress. The reason I remain fond of Haim is because their debut album, 2013’s Days Are Gone, is an (almost) perfect pop-rock record and one of the best of the 2010s. Regrettably, their second album, 2017’s Something To Tell You, was a damp squib, on which the dial that had previously jerked tensely between mindless bubblegum pop and experimental studio wizardry lurched lamentably toward the former end of the spectrum. After that disappointment, I lost interest, but with the release of I Quit, I went back and listened to their third album, 2020’s Women in Music Part III, a stripped back affair that most would probably describe as “a more mature record” (i.e. they sing about snorting coke at the corner shop rather than Toni Braxton-like meditations on how they “gonna treat you right”).
For the most part, I Quit builds on and extends what I suppose must now be considered Haim’s “signature sound.” There are some occasional jarring diversions into Madonna-style 80s synthpop (“Spinning”), Mariah Carey-style 90s R’N’B pop (“Relationships”), dirty grunge (“Lucky Stars”), and what can only be described as Robert-Smith-on-amphetamines-spoken-word-poetry (“Million Years”). But for the most part, the blueprint is familiar from Women in Music: bass and drum-heavy, bluesy rock, a somewhat starker, more abrasive and, in my opinion, less interesting sound than the glossy, cinematic mien of their debut.
And in contrast to their first two records, I Quit is loaded with keepin’-it-real lyrics that tell it like it is, yo. Haim’s first two albums were riddled with half-formed, nebulous, colourless, sometimes juvenile lyrical offal of the play-it-safe Swiftian variety. Here, by contrast, the words are raw without, to their credit, seeming studiedly so. Haim rarely venture away from the banal concerns of self-absorbed and hedonistic college girls, remaining firmly fixed on the realm of “fuckin’ relationships” from the first to the last minute of the record. But that’s perfectly understandable in this civil war-like climate, in which expressing even the most innocuous political opinion risks alienating half of your potential market and perhaps precipitating an assassination attempt against your very person. And though the lyrics are not very adventurous, they remain lucid, amusing, and occasionally brave, an effective conjuring of the scattered and frazzled lives of godless young women in the heathen West.
And yet, though we’re dealing here with a level of sophistication beyond anything articulated on the first two albums, the music has gone backwards, if you want my opinion. Haim’s slickly produced debut managed to combine 70s soft rock with an icy New Wave sheen – think Fleetwood Mac meets Duran Duran – and the result was compellingly chrome plated. Since the sophomore disaster of Something To Tell You, however, Haim have retreated to the tedious tradition of self-satisfied, pseudo-authentic garage rock. The result is smart, occasionally sassy, but none of the songs here really land, and it feels like there are about fifty of them. This is now the third album in a row that has left me with the impression that Haim never had more than seven or eight good songs in them, though I suppose that’s seven or eight more than Tay Tay.
Overall rating: * *
Standout track: “Cry”