On March 10th, the three sisters who make up the band HAIM were in New York City to launch what they were calling their “Deli Tour” of the country, to promote their new album, “Women in Music Pt. III.” The concept of the tour had sentimental significance. The sisters—Alana, who is twenty-eight, Danielle, thirty-one, and Este, thirty-four—had performed their first rock show at Canter’s deli, in their home town of Los Angeles, in 2000, back when the trio were in a family band with their parents called Rockinhaim, which specialized mostly in covers of oldies. In the two decades since, HAIM had released three major-label records, played Glastonbury and Coachella, made music videos with Paul Thomas Anderson, and become icons of walking in a city where people supposedly don’t walk. They’d been big for a while; it was time to get small, if only for a moment—they were due to play Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl later in 2020.
I met them in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel. Danielle and I elbow-bumped instead of shaking hands—laughing as we did it, as if we were only pantomiming our health anxieties—and the band and I tried to sit apart yet together on adjoining red velvet couches, although six feet had not yet become the baseline of social distancing. Nobody wore a mask, but the lobby was almost empty, eerie. Everything would change within days. But at this moment the sisters were barrelling ahead with the deli tour; that night they would play Sarge’s, in Midtown East, a family favorite. (Their father, Moti, was a professional soccer player in Israel before emigrating, in 1980, to California, where he met their mother, Donna; the two went into real estate together.) The sisters constantly overlap and interrupt one another in conversation; it’s like talking to an effervescent hydra. Talk of Jewish food—the reliability of the Reuben, the insuperable grossness of gefilte fish—transitioned perhaps inevitably to how our bat mitzvahs reflected our respective personalities. For hers, Este recreated Sugar Ray’s video for “Every Morning,” shot for shot, in a roller rink in the San Fernando Valley. Alana requested a “Mardi Gras” theme, without understanding what it meant. Danielle chose not to have a celebration. “I don’t really like having parties,” she said, quietly. “I’m scared no one’s going to show up.”
“Women in Music Pt. III” has moments like this, when the breezy, comfy ambience is suddenly broken by intimations of anxiety, overthinking, and loneliness. The album has a bit more emotional scaffolding beneath it than “Days Are Gone,” from 2013, and “Something to Tell You,” from 2017. The HAIM project has always been in part a mood and a magnetic aesthetic, captured in their trademark walk—a row of sisters in high-waisted jeans, clomping down the sunbaked streets of Los Angeles, inseparable and in sync. A large part of HAIM’s initial appeal was the aura of entangled sisterhood: they write songs together (Este plays bass, Danielle is lead on guitar and vocals, Alana plays keyboard and guitar; all three play percussion); talk on the phone constantly; and, when restrictions eased in California, they resumed going to each other’s houses every day. (After a recent spike in cases, they’ve gone back to quarantining separately.) They had lifetime memberships to a club that no one else could join, but we could pay a cover charge to hear the music.
With “Women in Music Pt. III,” there’s a loosening-up, an invitation into darker, more candid terrain. Much of the record was written in a cramped, windowless studio in Burbank in early 2019. The studio once belonged to Danielle’s partner, Ariel Rechtshaid—a producer who has worked with Vampire Weekend, Adele, and Kelela, and who co-produced the new album—and the sisters decided to lock themselves in for several weeks to see if songs would tumble out. It was an ad-hoc form of group therapy: Alana was working through unprocessed grief for her best friend, Sammi Kane Kraft, who died in a car accident in 2012; Este, who has Type 1 diabetes, was exhausted after months of touring; and Danielle was dealing with depression. (The bonus track, “Now I’m In It,” which the sisters wrote with the album’s co-producer Rostam Batmanglij, directly addresses Danielle’s struggles.)
Perhaps vulnerability was what was missing from HAIM before; they had nailed goofiness and buoyancy, but the songs could feel almost too shiny and squeaky, like fresh car wax. In “Women in Music Pt. III,” they talk about everything that they weren’t talking about before: social isolation in the age of the Internet, mental illness, unfinished business with ex-boyfriends, drunk sexts, unrequited yearning, and the ways that male critics have dismissed them in the past. In “Man from a Magazine,” a song that in both its chord progressions and vibrato echoes Joni Mitchell, Danielle confronts a journalist who mocked Este’s emphatic facial expressions when she plays bass, asking if she “makes the same faces in bed.” “Hey, man, what kind of question is that?” she sings. “What do you really want me to say back? / What’s going on behind those dark glasses? / Is this what you think making a pass is?” There is anger and exasperation all over the record, as if the women have grown tired of the contortions required to perpetuate their own cool-girl mythology.
The resulting record is coherent and yet pleasantly disjointed; there is no one genre on it, no dominant tone. It sounds like a band purposefully trying to wriggle free of what came before. Danielle said that the band had been inspired by Outkast’s eclectic album “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below”: “We thought it would be cool to make a body of work that didn’t adhere to specific rules or genre, like they did,” she told me. The album is, by the band’s own admission, quite all over the place. “The Steps” is a fuzzed-out, shambling rock song in the Sheryl Crow mode; “I Know Alone” is a thrumming electronic-dance track about being addicted to your iPhone; “Leaning on You” is a jaunty friendship anthem that borrows from Lindsey Buckingham’s bright guitar riffs; “FUBT” is a soulful, stripped-down lament about lost love that evokes a track Prince might have cut after midnight. HAIM makes dozens of cheeky musical references on the album, and the cumulative effect of these footnotes is to prove that they can play whatever they want.
After I met HAIM at the Bowery Hotel, in March, they continued to Washington, D.C., where they played one more deli show before returning to Los Angeles to shelter in place. Each sister quarantined separately in their houses near one another on the east side of Los Angeles. About two months passed before they formed a pod; they had been worried about Este, who is considered to be at high risk for complications from the virus. “Danielle and Alana wanted to wrap me in bubble wrap,” Este told me on Zoom. “I went full ‘Cast Away.’ ” Those two months, during which they communicated largely via video chat, was one of the longest periods that the sisters had ever spent apart.
The last time I spoke to them, they had recently released the video for “I Know Alone,” which was shot in April in a backyard basketball court, using choreography from another musician, Frances Starlite. Because each of the sisters learned their dance moves via video chat, they found that when they finally got together, they were all on the wrong foot. “We didn’t realize that Zoom had a feature where other people see the mirrored version of you,” Alana said. “But we’ve always said that we love a homework assignment.” In quarantine, Alana has been doing needlepoint, Danielle has been cooking, and Este has been sending her sisters their old GarageBand demos, back from when the three of them first started playing together as a band, in 2007. In June, HAIM performed songs from the new album in the empty dining room of Canter’s for a YouTube video. It was the closest that they will get to the full deli tour, for now. Canter’s sent Alana home with a big pink box of chocolate rugelach. “I’ve been living on that for a couple weeks,” she said.
