Hey kid, wanna hear a horror story? Alana Haim has some crazy ones. All three Haim sisters do, actually: Over the past 20-odd years, they’ve dated their fair share of creeps, weirdos, and losers. One song on their fourth album—whose pithy, merch-ready title has to be withheld for now—is called “Take Me Back,” and it serves as a rose-tinted eulogy to all those crazy, unusual, or downright terrible lost loves. Such as: The time Alana tried to hook up with a guy she had the “biggest fucking crush on,” only for him to end up embarrassed and her to end up in need of a tetanus shot.
“You know that feeling when you’ve seen this person forever, and they don’t notice you, and then, you know, it’s on? I saw him from across the room—I was like ‘Oh my God, he’s never noticed me in my life’—and now he’s noticing me,” Alana says, gesticulating wildly. We’re crammed into a booth in Casa Vega, a “special occasion” Mexican restaurant the three went to as kids growing up in the valley, and now that Alana has had half a Corona, “I’m like, let me tell you everything.”
“We went back to his house, and we were lying on his bed. And when he tried to get on top of me, he farted. Full fart. Not a cute, like, under the radar fart—it was like, full fart,” she says, half amused, half mortified. (Danielle and Este, like a built in Greek chorus, offer murmurs of “Oh, God.”) “I was like, you know what? That’s cool. No shaming of farts, like go off. But then I think he got embarrassed, and he was just like, ‘Maybe we should go to bed.’ And I was like, ‘Whatever you feel’.”
So far, fairly normal, as far as dating stories go. But she’s not done. “His dog had come in at that point, and jumped on the bed. It was like, a tiny bed, and he had like, a big dog, not a cute little lap dog, he had a dog,” she continues, with the curt, matter-of-fact style of a journalist in a ’90s rom-com. “And in the middle of the night, it had jumped on the bed and nuzzled between me and the guy. So I guess I started spooning this dog by accident. I didn’t know the dog was there. I guess I twitch in my sleep because I’m a very active dreamer, so I think I did a movement, and the dog got so scared that it woke up and it bit my nose.
“It started bleeding, but I’m such a people pleaser, and I’m so embarrassed that I was like ‘It’s totally fine.’ I’m like gushing blood, cleaning myself up, don’t leave, and am like ‘Let’s just go back to bed’,” she says, hitting the gruesome ordeal’s beats with timing that suggest she’s told this one many times over. “I wake up in the morning and… how it was on. I was like, ‘We’re never gonna see each other again!’”
You could see that story as a warning about the horrors of swimming through the dating pool—I certainly did—but Alana wears it as a badge of honor. The fourth Haim album is a celebration of total freedom: to be by yourself, to make your own choices and, sometimes, to stay at a hookup’s place after you get farted on and, later, bitten. The tenuous middleground between breaking up and staying together has always been a favored topic for Alana, Danielle, and Este, and there’s certainly some of that here—lead single “Relationships,” released today, is about the torturous feeling of knowing you should break up but not wanting to. This time around, there’s also the crackling, almost adolescent messiness of single life mixed in.
This new spirit has spread, maybe, into the way they’re talking about the music. Crammed into a booth in the back of the chintzy, low-lit restaurantDanielle, 36, in a black shirt, Alana, 33, in a baby-blue waistcoat, Este, 39, quiet between them in a cream knit and orange-tinted aviators—they seem animated and forthcoming, more willing to talk in specifics about the real-life inspirations behind the songs.
After the release of 2020’s Women In Music Part III—the band’s best, most acclaimed album ever, and their first to be nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys—Danielle broke up with her longtime boyfriend and the band’s longtime producer, Ariel Rechtshaid. Haim 4 is the first album they’ve done without his involvement and, for the first time since 2011, Danielle found herself single. “I’m a serial monogamist–in high school, I was always wanting a boyfriend and I didn’t have one. All I wanted was for someone to ask me to prom, and no one did,” she says. After that, all she did was get into long-term relationships; “Being single now, I’m just trying to embrace it, because I’m… I feel like I’m the age where I need to embrace it,” she says, with a wry laugh.
“Relationships” finds Haim tapping back into the slick ’90s R&B sounds that they explored on their second album, 2017’s Something To Tell You—and, fittingly, it was written in 2017, as the first song for Women In Music, on a plane in Australia. Danielle, the band’s primary songwriter and co-producer, always had “some weird thing in my head that was like ‘You need to finish this.’” When this album,with its stories of heartbreak, weird mishaps, and avowed singledom, started to coalesce, it became clear that the track was about to have its time. Working with Rostam, another longtime collaborator, the band tried to “write songs like the Chili Peppers,” says Rostam over the phone—just getting into the room together and working stuff out live—and began to blend the raw, immediate feeling of Women In Music with the high-sheen qualities of their past records. “It was pretty freeing to just be in the room with an acoustic guitar, a bunch of acoustic guitars, and just drums,” says Este.
After Women In Music, the band started to feel like “totally different people,” says Alana, in part because Danielle moved in with her during the recording process for its follow-up, recreating the kind of family living situation they hadn’t experienced since Alana was 16. “Imagine, we’re both in our 30s, and we’re living together again. It was like, super fun to be like, dating, and having to be like to a dude ‘You should come back to my house’ and then having to remember ‘But, oh my god, I’m so sorry, my sister lives with me,’” she says. “I kind of saw what Danielle was going through, making an album – the work never really left, which was kind of inspiring.”
Alana describes this record as “the closest we’ve ever gotten to how we wanted to sound,” and says that it was a “completely different experience” recording this time around. As for the reason why, says Danielle: “Glaringly, this part’s a little hard for me to talk about, but we weren’t working with”—she lowers her voice and shrugs a little—”Ariel. There’s a lot to unpack there, but yeah. Working with Rostam, in general it’s very quick, kinetic with him, which I really love as an artist,” she says. “Maybe before, it wasn’t that way, it was kind of a more… longer, searching, labored situation.”
That fleet-footedness is evident in the album’s opening track, “Gone,” a blast of bristling post-breakup energy that feels like one long, cathartic scream after years of pushing everything down. Over chugging guitar, Danielle sings a salvo that’s tattoo fodder in the making: “You can hate me for what I am/You can shame me for what I’ve done/You can’t make me disappear/You never saw me for what I was.” Then, the sample kicks in: the glorious, uproarious gospel chant from George Michael’s “Freedom ’90.” It’s bold and a little ridiculous—and as yet uncleared, although “everything’s gonna figure out,” says Alana—and a perfect way to start an album that celebrates autonomy after a relationship. “I was listening to the Beyoncé album, and I was really inspired by all the different samples,” says Danielle. “It doesn’t feel ‘Fuck you’ to me—it feels like… ‘I’m gonna do my thing.’”
That thing, right now, might be relatively shocking to Haim fans: a move to New York. Este’s fiancé lives there, and Danielle has been spending a lot of time there for the first time since the mid-2000s when she was playing in Julian Casablancas’ band. “I feel like there’s a new energy there. As you know, I’m single, and LA is the worst place for dating, truly,” Danielle says. “I can be really isolated, and I just feel like in New York, it’s so easy, everyone is kind of hitting you up. It’s better for my personality, because I can definitely be a hermit.”
Alana, for her part, plans to hold down the fort in Los Angeles, and maintain what she describes as a “stallion” lifestyle. She claims to have never had a boyfriend for more than a year, in contrast to her perpetually monogamous sisters. There’s never been a better time, of course, to be the resident single girl among the Haim sisters. “Coming into this album, it feels like all three of us are really in tune with what we want, and we’re not fucking afraid to say like—I’m sorry, now I’m two beers in—If I want to fuck somebody, I’ll fuck in the way that I want to,” she says. “I’m not gonna feel judged by it. If I wanna go on dates, if I wanna do whatever… Do whatever feels good to you.”
Lead image: Haim wears bras AGENT PROVOCATEUR, jeans BLUEY DENIM
photography MORGAN MAHER
styling VALERIA SEMUSHINA
hair AMBER DUARTE
makeup CIARA MACCARO
set designer JAMES RENE