Kudos to Haim, first of all, for the best album title of the year. Breakup albums are so common that it’s surprising no one previously had the temerity and/or genius to name such a record “I Quit.” If that bluntness sound a little prosaic at first, there’s a curt poetry to it that comes into focus listening through 15 tracks that consist almost entirely of sisters Danielle, Alana and Este Haim handing in their respective resignations to long- or short-term partners, effectively immediately. Who will be cleaning out whose desk may be in question (“You packed my shit / But it’s nothing I needed,” Danielle informs her ex in the opening cut, “Gone”). But there’s no issue as to who’s finally the boss… or the triune bosses, in the case of this sisterhood.
Danielle revealed in pre-release promo for the album that it captured a time when “we were all single at the same time for the first time since high school,” which is useful backstory, and also something that we might almost have come around to guessing on our own, given the consistency of themes on this fourth album. Apart from a few notable outlier songs, “I Quit” has a pretty severe concentration on “why I left” (or “why I’m about to”) themes — and along with that narrowing of lyrical concerns, there’s a concurrent streamlining of their sound, too. Those two things feel kind of connected: The split Danielle Haim is presumably writing about was with Ariel Rechtshaid, who was a primary co-producer/co-writer on the previous three records. His absence doesn’t make for a total 180 reversal; Haim’s other major standing collaborator, Rostam Batmanglij, is still on board co-producing with Danielle, so there are still points of sonic continuity. What Rechtshaid took with him, for better or worse, are some of the quirky and clever aural landscaping that marked 2020’s “Women in Music Pt. III.” If you wanted Haim to be a bit more of the rock band on record that they’ve always been on stage, this is a newly independent step back in that direction, along with all the more personal declarations of indie-pendence.
There are tradeoffs, of course. If you appreciated “WIM III” as kind of their White Album (and I’d still rate it among the best records of the decade, five years later), there’s something to be missed from that heightened eclecticism, in this somewhat more minimalist approach. At the same time, I appreciated hearing Danielle (a multi-instrumentalist) get bashier on the drums on “All Over Me,” or contributing power chords and a flipped-out guitar solo to tracks like “Gone.” It feels like getting closer to the source of what the band might sound like in the rehearsal studio, with less sense of anyone else putting a stamp on that. (With apologies to Batmanglij, the ex-Vampire Weekend guy, who probably leaves a perfectly strong imprint, just one that’s less evident.)
Those aforementioned outliers, the numbers that keep “I Quit” from completely settling into a mood? Well, if you’re a fan, you’ve already had three months to settle in with the leadoff single, “Relationships,” which aims to make some fun out of domestic drollery with chanty asides and a ’90s R&B feel that feels akin to some of the band’s other past detours out of a rock realm, with a bit of funk bass and a drum track that feels mechanical, even if it’s not. “Take Me Back,” meanwhile, is the most blatant stab at kicking the album’s capital-F-fun quotient up a few serious notches; it’s a fast-chugging, hand-clapping dip into affectionate nostalgia for the San Fernando Valley misadventures of the sisters’ rowdy teens and post-adolescence, naming names in some instances. (“Alana lost her head when she had a crush / Billy St. Reams didn’t wanna fuck” — yes, it sounds a little like “People Who Died,” except with people sharting instead of OD-ing in the back of the truck.)
“Million Years” is another serious departure from the rest of the record: It’s breakbeat time! And also a rare time on the album in which the sisters allow themselves the possibility of transcendent romantic love, theoretically, some time in a California beach-haze future. “Spinning” mixes up disco and some faintly “1999”-era synth touches, as a bed for Alana to imagine getting dizzy with infatuation.
But when it comes to “Relationships,” if you’re wondering what these ladies’ position on that subject is… well, it’s pretty much against, generally. That’s even the case for one of the album’s cheerier numbers, “All Over Me,” a highly carnal ditty that seems to be about the glories of revenge coitus. At least, it’s very sex-positive and monogamy-negative. “You know I’ve always had a wild heart / And that won’t ever change / So when you see me out with someone else / I will not be ashamed,” sings Danielle, with lyrics that extol the benefits of having a fuckboy: “I know it’s not quite what you want, being on call for me… / Your bed or my floor / But don’t tell me that you’re in love / ’Cause I’m not trying to walk the line.” Maybe only female artists could get away nowadays with that cavalier of a traditionally male attitude about situationships, but it feels as bold as it means to be.
So those are the tracks that determinedly break from the overriding tone that runs through the other songs, which is rather more glum, or at least searching and reflective about why too much time got wasted in a long, nowhere love affair. Some of the splitsville songs on the album blend together a bit; there are moments where you may mentally flag an especially good breakup line, then note that it also could just as easily been placed in several other tunes that run along the same lines. But the whole album, or most of it, is an admission that it’s hard to get unstuck first of all from a no-longer-functioning relationship, then get unstuck from spending further time trying to make retrospective sense of it. It’s about overthinking the aftermath of something you didn’t spend enough time thinking through while it was happening. So having some of these songs run through the same emotional ground is neither a feature or a flaw; it just is. And they’re good company, these Haims, when they’re letting their Superfun Sister Trio guard down to attend to the business of mulling.
If Haim is “Down to Be Wrong,” we don’t want to be right. That’s a solidly low-key number that has Danielle singing about being the one who leaves, not the one who is left, and the temptation to be guilted out of giving up on that resolve, or at least regretting it. “I left you you the keys / I left on the lights / I locked myself out of the house / I’m on the next flight,” she sings, over barely more than a snare and hi-hat at first. There will be explanations: “Boy I crushed my whole heart / Trying to fit my soul into your arms / And I crushed up these pills and I still couldn’t take ’em” — this is sad stuff, but you can’t help noticing there’s something that sounds as playful as it does poignant. Suddenly, there’s a loud rhythm guitar break that is right out of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.” Whether the reference is meant to be deliberate or not, the effect of this song is not unlike that one: It can feel exhilarating to leave someone behind, even if you’re not positive you aren’t plunging.
“The Farm” is a more gentle and somehow more wry highlight among the breakup songs, beginning with an acoustic guitar opening that sounds like a nod to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” before describing a split in the practical terms of a business decision: “We could keep on trying / Or we could sell the farm / Just buy me out.” Those last four words make up one of the best and bluntest lines in the Haim catalog — a great, if super-quiet, moment of can’t-cry-anymore catharsis.
Now, they do have a song called “Cry” on the album, and it unironically lives up to its tearjerker title, as a near-country ballad where Este shows some real vulnerability about being somewhere amid the “seven stages of grief” after walking out. But this, too, is an outlier. If you’re looking for a dominant emotion in “I Quit,” go back to that album title, where, in Johnny Paycheck fashion, they’re telling Mr. Wrong to take this job and shove it. Actual regrets? Almost too few to mention.
And the Haims are good company in nuanced-but-defiant mode. The album’s best track might be its closer, “Now It’s Time,” which gives U2 co-writing credit basically for having lifted a couple of power chords from the song “Numb” … and, sure, a whole rocking coda that kind of nods to that band’s ’90s sound. Danielle sounds newly awakened, not numbed, as she sings about being proactive in moving on instead of obsessively focusing on the desire for an apology.
How can you not fall for an album that, after having gone almost kind of soft on us for a few tunes, comes back around to feisty point A, ending with the couplet: “Am I reaching out to say / I never gave two fucks anyway?” They did give this album the right title, but “Women in Music Pt. F.U.” would’ve worked, too.
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