“‘Haim’s new album is like ‘I can’t wait to be thirty’’” one Twitter user writes, following the release of Haim’s fourth studio album I Quit. Reading the statement made me understand almost perfectly what lies at the crux of the album; the album, despite maintaining Haim’s hallmark sense of youthful playfulness, is undoubtedly their maturest to date. At the same time, Danielle Haim’s claim in relation to the album’s title being taken from the iconic “I Quit!” scene from That Thing You Do that “it honestly made us laugh” cements a certain level of unseriousness around the album. The album is all about juxtaposition; a unilateral sense of not taking life too seriously while simultaneously feeling it all in the most earnest way possible.
The album has all of Haim’s classic hallmarks; a vintage flair, folky and acoustic combined with a classic pop style, their sense of whimsy. An image from the band’s social media, that circled with the release of the album’s single ‘Relationships’, features the three sisters strutting down the street, their arms swung out, an image of carefree nature akin to the viral photo of Nicole Kidman post Tom Cruise break-up.
The tone of the album’s songs are warm, messy, fast paced—you can image swinging your arms down the street to them—but they also hold an underlying sense of grief and frustration. Following the end of ‘Everybody’s Trying To Figure Me Out’, the song closes with th repeated phrase ‘You think you’re gonna die but you’re not gonna die!’. Their track 12 ‘Cry’ almost perfectly encapsulates the string that runs through the album; the song is upbeat and poppy despite the the sisters sing ‘I just cry, cry, cry, I keep asking God why I can’t stop crying, I just cry and I don’t know why!’. It holds a kind of cruel optimism; as you strut down the street with outstretched arms in a carefree and joyful nature, you simultaneously acknowledge that pain, difficulty in growing older, messy friends and hard relationships and the feeling that you want to cry, cry, cry can, and do, run parallel.
In an interview, Alana Haim states that “every single song has a theme of quitting something that isn’t working for us anymore”. The album’s title—and the graphics that follow Haim’s live performance since the album’s announcement (‘I quit drinking! I quit drugs! I quit boyfriends!)—combine with the hopefulness of the album to create a strange irony; a message that when you cease to care what comes out of that is not ceasing to care in the nihilistic way that many of the lyrics posit, but instead caring about what matters.
“HAIM AT HOME – LOS ANGELES” by jaredeberhardt is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
