HAIM - I quit

The fourth studio album by the acclaimed HAIM sisters could just as easily be called ‘fuck it’. Launched with a fittingly low-fi yet perfectly dramatic music video listing all the things being tossed aside (everything from overthinking to dick) this amped-up self-defiance has spawned what the trio have labelled “the sound they have always wanted to make”, a middle finger to pretty much everything. The concept is simple; quitting makes space for the new.

That said, ‘I quit’ doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel and most of, if not all, the HAIM staples are here: biting satire, tongue-in-cheek takedowns, and Southern-style guitars over a Los Angeles sunshine haze. But in parting with longtime producer and Danielle Haim’s former partner Ariel Rechtshaid (another addition to the list of many things that have been ‘quit’), the sisters have opened up new doors, with the free-flowing recording process conjuring everything from country-tinged pop through to spoken word and considered samples, and what can only be described as their biggest dance tracks to date.

All this allows space for the riotous nostalgia of ‘Take Me Back’, a song that successfully paints a rosy picture of a messy drug-infused incident in the back of a pickup truck, and the bedroom-pop adjacent beats of ‘Million Years’ - both a heavy upgrade on the sounds explored on 2020’s ‘Women In Music Pt. III’. From the playful despondency of ‘Relationships’ to the concluding, liberating resignation of ‘Now It’s Time’, their ‘fuck it’ attitude is nothing short of palpable. “Now it’s time to let go,” they note on the album’s climax, before a dirge of rock riffs and distorted vocals showcase a trio free from shackles and more than ready to let the world have it.