The New Old Sound of Adult Anxiety

The often-cited statistic that 50 percent of American marriages end in divorce has long been overstated: The divorce rate started sliding from its historical peak way back in 1980. But the myth of the modern marriage being doomed to fail endures because it was seared into the cultural consciousness—like so much else—by Baby Boomers. After the sexual revolution of the '60s and the legalization of no-fault divorce, they availed themselves of the freedom to leave their spouse—and then parlayed that experience into now-classic movies, books, and rock about going your own way.
Boomers' children aren't getting hitched as easily, and those who do are less likely to split up. That's probably a result of living in an ever more individualized, ever less traditional, and ever more expensive society—and of having studied the cautionary tales of their elders. But Millennials do have their version of divorce rock: the softly grooving Los Angeles band Haim. The group's three members have never been married, but their new album, I Quit, cleverly remixes the breakup-music canon for a generation that's wary of tying the knot.
Since their 2013 debut, the Haim sisters—Este (39), Danielle (36), and Alana (33)—have gained fame as pop celebrities who are fluent in TikTok and friends with Taylor Swift. Yet, as a rare band in an era of solo stars, they're also a throwback. Haim's songs blend the rollicking chemistry of Fleetwood Mac, the muscular femininity of Heart, and the mystic cheesiness of Phil Collins (with a smattering of new-jack-swing sparkle). But the sisters swap the earnest grandiosity of their influences for cheeky nonchalance, hinting that nothing they sing about is all that serious. In videos, they strut down streets like Tina Turner, except with all of Turner's outsize emoting replaced by smirks. The band's great 2013 single, 'The Wire,' is about ditching a perfectly nice partner, counseling, 'I just know, I know, I know, I know that you're gonna be okay anyway.'
Though the band's lyrics have long been preoccupied with breakups, I Quit is the moment these Stevie Nicks disciples attempt their Rumours: a kaleidoscopic and questing pop epic about unraveling commitments (though made in circumstances of sibling solidarity rather than burning tension between bandmates). The three sisters were each single while recording the album, and have marketed that fact by sharing dating horror stories online. The most consequential breakup here is that of the lead singer, Danielle. In 2022, she exited a relationship of nine years with the producer Ariel Rechtshaid, who'd worked on all of the band's previous albums. The split apparently represented both a personal and an artistic unchaining. Danielle told ID magazine that Rechtshaid took a 'searching, labored' approach to recording, whereas I Quit 's lead producer, Rostam Batmanglij, is 'quick' and 'kinetic.' The album's title is meant to convey liberation: 'The exit is also the entrance,' Este said to GQ.
The music does feel quite unshackled. Haim's previous and best album, 2020's Women in Music Pt. III, was a delicate jewelbox of sound, but I Quit is all surge and excess. Its songs go on longer, say more, and do more than is expected or, sometimes, advisable. The opening track's grating sample of George Michael 's 'Freedom! '90' feels like the result of a dare; a number of genre digressions—into drum and bass, industrial rock, and shoegaze—are amusing but inessential. The highlights, though, are Haim-ian in the best way: instinctual and playful. Incongruous musical styles join up through ingenious, gliding transitions. The arrangements sizzle and fizzle like Pop Rocks thanks to creative instrumentation and digital editing.
The lead single, 'Relationships,' is the album's manifesto: 'I think I'm in love but I can't stand fucking relationships,' Danielle sings. Bickering and restlessness has her running a cost-benefit analysis on her beloved, and the music sounds as confused as she is, rotating from goofy hip-hop to plangent quiet storm to handclap-driven hoedown. Boomers loom in the background: 'Oh this can't just be the way it is / Or is it just the shit our parents did?' Really, it's not the shit her parents did—they're long married with three daughters. The narrator of this song, by contrast, sounds barely tethered, like a Mylar balloon on a fraying string.
Which isn't to say she finds a serious relationship painless to sever. The album serves up the expected outpourings of post-breakup grief ('Cry,' whose elegant melody evokes Annie Lennox), anger ('Now It's Time,' which interpolates a pounding riff from U2's Zooropa), and horniness (the country romp 'All Over Me'). But its centerpiece tracks march from ambivalence to … a different kind of ambivalence. The excellent 'Down to Be Wrong' is the confession of someone defiantly leaving the life they've built, all the while maintaining a pit-in-the-stomach terror about the unknown. As the song builds from iciness to fieriness, Danielle conveys a belief in following your own desires—even if you don't fully understand what those desires are, much less where they'll take you.
In moments like that, Haim's music attains a newfound sense of drama: the drama of experiencing life as a purely internal, self-directed struggle. The narrators of these songs don't worry about betraying an oath or straying from a traditional role; friends and family figure in only as concerned characters wondering whether their newly single buddy is okay. Everyone seems to agree that happiness, or at least liberation, is the noblest goal. But that prerogative to chase self-actualization at all costs brings with it the dread of failure, as heavy as the booming drums that ground the album's otherwise spry arrangements. At one point, Danielle quotes Bob Dylan in 1965: 'How does it feel to be on your own?' She's repeating a question asked at the dawn of a social revolution whose effects, sonic and spiritual, ripple ever onward.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Vogue

37 minutes ago

• Vogue

Haim Isn't Answering to Anyone

Danielle Haim is in the middle of explaining her songwriting process when she's interrupted by a call on her hotel phone. 'One second,' she says. Luckily, her siblings Alana and Este, who round out the band Haim, are there to fill the void, performing a rapid-fire riff—a sister act, if you will. 'You have a caller! Who is it?' Alana asks. 'Is it mom?' Este wonders. 'It's probably mom,' Alana concludes. Photo: Heidi Stanton The trio have always been close, but their synchronicity has never been more apparent than on their fourth studio album, I Quit, out today. On its face, the record—co-produced by Danielle and Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of Vampire Weekend—is a breakup album, largely inspired by Danielle's split from Ariel Rechtshaid, who produced the band's previous three records. Over its 15 tracks, the record travels from the lusty beginnings of a romance to the grief of its dissolution and the catharsis of finding closure. But present throughout is a sense of ecstasy: in album opener 'Gone'—with its sample from George Michael's 'Freedom! '90'—and the jubilant, Alana-led 'Spinning,' all the way through to the percussive closer, 'Now It's Time.' 'I wish I could tell you there was some huge blowup with my past relationship. The real story is just two people that lost each other,' Danielle says. 'There's a lot of love there. I think we made really great music with my ex, and he's such a genius producer, but I think I really found so much strength in producing this with Rostam. I really feel like it's our best work.'

UPI

an hour ago

• UPI

Listen: Haim releases 'I Quit,' first studio album in five years

1 of 4 | Este Haim, Alana Haim and Danielle Haim released "I Quit," Haim's first studio album in five years. File Photo by Chris Chew/UPI | License Photo June 20 (UPI) -- Haim released I Quit, their first studio album in five years, and sat down with Kesha to explain the process behind the new record. The album marks the sisters' first new album release since Women in Music Pt. III in 2020. The sisters -- Este, Danielle and Alana -- sat down with longtime friend Kesha to discuss their new album in an episode of Spotify's Countdown To. "We've always been obsessed with how people can mix sounds and genres," Danielle Haim said in a clip released to Instagram. "That's just always been our bag." The sisters also shared how the album's title, I Quit, is a reference to a scene in the film That Thing You Do when Jimmy (Johnathon Schaech) sings those words into a microphone in the studio. Haim also released the official audio Friday for the song "Million Years" on YouTube. I Quit is out Friday in record stores and on streaming platforms.

Yahoo

an hour ago

• Yahoo

Haim's new album gives vivid shape to a hard-to-define phase

Haim's 'I Quit' is not quite a breakup album and not quite a moving-on album; rather, the fourth LP by this beloved Los Angeles sister trio lands somewhere between those tried-and-true schemes: Its title inspired, the Haims have said, by a third-act mic drop in the cult-fave 1996 movie 'That Thing You Do!,' 'I Quit' is about looking back from the middle distance on a relationship that didn't work and assessing what you learned (and what you didn't) from the experience. 'Can I have your attention, please, for the last time before I leave?' Danielle Haim sings over a trembling acoustic guitar riff to open the album with 'Gone.' Then: 'On second thought, I changed my mind.' In 'All Over Me,' she's exulting in the erotic thrill of a new situationship — 'Take off your clothes / Unlock your door / 'Cause when I come over / You're gonna get some' — while warning the guy not to get out over his skis as any kind of partner. Este Haim takes over lead vocals for 'Cry,' in which she's unsure of her place in the seven stages of grief: 'I'm past the anger, past the rage, but the hurt ain't gone.' How to musicalize such a state of transition? On 'I Quit,' which Danielle co-produced with Rostam Batmanglij, the sisters do it with songs that go in multiple directions at once, as in 'Relationships,' which sounds like 'Funky Divas' meets 'Tango in the Night,' and 'Everybody's Trying to Figure Me Out,' a deconstructed blues strut that bursts into psych-pop color in the chorus. They do it by trying new things, as in the shoegazing 'Lucky Stars' and 'Spinning,' which has Alana Haim cooing breathily over a shuffling disco beat. (In some ways, 'I Quit' feels closely aligned with the newly sexed-up 'Sable, Fable' by Bon Iver, whose Justin Vernon was involved in a couple of songs on this album.) The Haims also do it, of course, by revisiting familiar comforts: 'Gone' samples George Michael's 'Freedom! '90'; 'Down to Be Wrong' evokes the blistered euphoria of peak Sheryl Crow; 'Now It's Time,' for some goofy reason, borrows the industrial-funk groove from U2's 'Numb.' Read more: How Jensen McRae became L.A.'s next great songwriter Nostalgia figures into the lyrics too, but it's all very sharply drawn, as in 'Take Me Back,' a caffeinated folk-rock shimmy where Danielle is thinking about the people she used to know in the Valley — 'David only wants to do what David wants / Had a bald spot, now it's a parking lot' — and how much easier things were when she'd cruise Kling Street 'looking for a place to park in an empty parking lot just so you can feel me up.' (Great guitar solo in this one.) In 'Down to Be Wrong,' she looks out from her window seat on a flight to somewhere and sees 'the street where we used to sleep' — a reference, one presumes, to her ex Ariel Rechtshaid, who helped produce Haim's first three albums and whose presence looms here like a phantom. Case in point: ''We want to see you smiling,' said my mother on the hill,' Danielle sings in the loping country ballad 'The Farm,' 'But the distance keeps widening between what I let myself say and what I feel.' Oof. Yet on an album about choosing who to leave behind and who to collide with for the first time, 'The Farm's" emotional climax comes in a touching verse where one of Danielle's sisters tells her she's welcome to crash 'if you need a place to calm down till you get back on your feet.' The upheaval won't last; family is forever. Get notified when the biggest stories in Hollywood, culture and entertainment go live. Sign up for L.A. Times entertainment alerts. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.