Experience has a way of undermining certainties — especially ones about people. Simple hero-villain narratives develop gray areas, motives are reassessed. Blame gets reapportioned, ambivalences creep in.
On “I Quit,” Haim’s fourth album, the sisters Danielle, Alana and Este Haim apply the same generation-spanning pop expertise and ambition that they’ve previously brought to simpler scenarios. It’s a breakup album, but one that navigates all sorts of mixed emotions: recriminations and apologies, righteousness and doubts, longing and renunciation.
The songs on “I Quit” move through regrets and second-guessing to find relief, even liberation, in being single. “Now I’m gone, now I’m free / Born to run, nothing I need,” Danielle Haim sings in “Gone,” the album’s agenda-setting opening track. Lest anyone miss the point, the song samples the gospelly chorus of George Michaels’s “Freedom! ’90.”
Haim’s 2013 debut album, “Days Are Gone,” introduced a band with classic-rock skills and 21st-century resources. Singing quick-tongued, fine-tuned harmonies, Haim reconfigured decades of physical and computerized California sounds: Fleetwood Mac above all, with its vocal harmonies and panoply of guitar tones, but also Sheryl Crow, Michael Jackson, Tom Petty, Beck and more.
Haim used that vocabulary, much of it from before the sisters were born, to sing about matters of the heart with an implicit family solidarity. Their early videos often showed them striding together down Los Angeles streets.
Onstage, Haim performs straightforwardly in real time, with the sisters switching among instruments. Meanwhile, in the studio, Haim slips all sorts of clever details and sly electronic textures into natural-sounding tracks.
For “I Quit,” Haim changed producers: from Ariel Rechtshaid, Danielle’s ex-boyfriend, to Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of Vampire Weekend, with Danielle as co-producer. It’s not a radical shift in the music; Batmanglij contributed to previous Haim albums. “I Quit” pushes the sound of Haim’s 2020 album “Women in Music Pt. III” in a rootsier direction, with a foundation of raw, slightly lo-fi drums and guitars; now their allusions reach back to the 1960s, with echoes of vintage Rolling Stones and the Band.
The linchpin of “I Quit” is the ruefully exasperated “Relationships.” It’s an off-center, R&B-flavored track that ponders the state of a very iffy romance — whether or not it’s love, whether it’s over or could get a reboot, whether it’s even worth trying at all. “Relationships — don’t they all end up the same? / When there’s no one left to blame?” Danielle sings. The lumpy beat has a hip-hop undertow; the keyboard chords are as ambiguous as the situation. But the sisters are united, harmonizing confidently on the word “relationships.”
The album works through persistent lovers’ quarrels. In “Love You Right,” a guitar-strumming ballad with echoes of George Harrison and Supertramp, Danielle sings that she’s “Trying to get out / trying to get even,” and she insists “I’ll be leaving tomorrow” — but she’s still touching him, and all too aware how much she’s been willing to forgive. In “Blood on the Street,” a lurching countryish waltz, the sisters sing, caustically, to someone who created “bad times when you were mine” but who still expects another chance: “What more could you want? You already took all my pride.”
Danielle makes her escape in “Down to Be Wrong”: locking the house and leaving behind the keys, getting on a plane and feeling her spirits rise with every additional mile away. “I didn’t think it could be so easy / ’til I left it behind,” she sings, buoyed by a chorale of “oh”s from her sisters.
Some songs envision new starts. In “All Over Me,” the singer takes charge of the terms of engagement; purely physical and nonmonogamous. “Don’t tell me that you’re in love,” Danielle sings over brusque, laconic guitar chords. “When you see me out with someone else / I will not be ashamed.” But there are benefits: “When I come over, you’re gonna get some.”
And while much of the album deals with past wounds, Haim knows better than to linger forever. “I Quit” ends with “Now It’s Time,” which is built on an unexpected sample: buzzing guitar blasts from “Numb” by U2. It’s a final list of bitter indictments: “I realize now you will always find a way / To keep feeling OK with lying to my face.”
While the song is a furious parting shot, it’s also a realization that “The real barrier to break is the one I feel inside.” When the beat and guitars drop away, Danielle speaks to herself: “It’s time to let go.”
Haim
“I Quit”
(Columbia)
Jon Pareles has been The Times’s chief pop music critic since 1988. He studied music, played in rock, jazz and classical groups and was a college-radio disc jockey. He was previously an editor at Rolling Stone and The Village Voice.
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