It’s an almost rainy day in Los Angeles when the three-sister band Haim chorus “Hello-o-o-o” over Zoom. They’re on the edge of a rainstorm, but they’re feeling good. They’re in motion.
In the decade since their first album, Days Are Gone, released in 2013, Alana, 31, Danielle, 33, and Este,
On stage, they slide from bittersweet melodies to standup-comedy-like ad-libs in bikini tops and leather pants — a row of rock stars scaling vulnerable and goofy terrain, spitting jokes and sore truths with an easy effervescence.
Their success has been on an individual level, too: lead vocalist Danielle has collaborated with Vampire Weekend; bassist Este worked as a music consultant for the Sicilian-drenched second season of tragicomedy The White Lotus; and keyboard and guitar player Alana made her debut performance as a somewhat lost (and, to her acting credit, indisputably assured and expressive) twenty-something in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Licorice Pizza, a swirling love story meets coming-of-age freewheel set in 70s San Fernando Valley (Este, Danielle, and their parents played her family).
You could say that, while apart, they don’t lose their centre, their sync-ness. In conversation, the sisters constantly interject and flow from one another. They’ve been compared to a hydra, a singular entity with different heads that act independently. So has their third and most recent album, Women in Music Pt. III, released in 2020.
It has variously been described as the right amount of coherence and disjointedness; a buoyant album that delights in having nothing fixed, that’s satirical in its title but feels deeper, more weighted than their earlier music that was sunny enough and vague enough to avoid exposition.
On the cover of this album, the sisters stand in their local Los Angeles deli Canter’s, where they performed one of their early shows. Behind the counter, arms crossed, hands on hips, wearing white aprons and hardened stares, they’re framed by a curtain of dangling salami.
It’s tongue-in-cheek (on the same day at that location, they filmed the video for their song Man From The Magazine, on misogyny and banal interview questions), an image perfectly calibrated to the Haims’ crackle of charisma, but belying the feelings — frustration and melancholy, at times — that listeners would soon encounter in their songs. It had stemmed from the effect of touring on Este, who has type 1 diabetes, the unprocessed grief Alana had after losing a friend in a car crash, and Danielle’s depression.
In and beyond all this, they flirt with funk, R&B and pop-rock, trusting their gut as it takes them somewhere else, and concretising the sense that part of their musical brilliance comes from a pull of warmth and electricity, a kinesis multiplied three-fold.
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“It always felt like we knew exactly what road we wanted to take, on what road we wanted to pave for ourselves,” says Alana, citing a total reliance on intuition for the direction of the Haim project. “It was all us. I think that’s how we always wanted our career to be.”
Este compares their relationship to a “built-in shield”, Danielle “a wolf pack”. “A lot of people along the way would be like, ‘You’re making the wrong decision,’ or, ‘This is going to ruin your career,’” says Danielle. “We really are able to stick to our guns because we have each other. I don’t understand how people do it on their own.”
“People ask us all the time, ‘How do you be in a band with your sisters?’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t know how you’re not in a band with your family,” adds Alana. “We’re fine over here.”
This year, they’re focused squarely on touring (the pandemic halted their shows for Women in Music Pt. III), playing in New Zealand and Australia, among other places, at St Jerome’s Laneway Festival, and joining Taylor Swift on her Eras tour with a special guest roster that includes Paramore, Phoebe Bridgers, and beabadoobee. (“That was, like, our evil plan,” jests Danielle. “We’ll open for her so we have tickets.”)
Long-time friends of Swift’s, the Haims recently assumed roles as fan-wielding, Victorian-gown-wafting wicked stepsisters to her exiled Cinderella and a plotting stepmother (an excellent Laura Dern) in the fairytale-themed video for Bejeweled.
The sisters have played a lot of dress up. From attending the 2021 Brit Awards in relaxed, minimalist The Row, to modelling in a springtime Coach campaign, to a rotating door of Louis Vuitton looks — often, little tops and wide-legged pants — that have become something of a stage uniform, the styles are co-ordinated and elastic, with an I-just-put-this-on-effortlessness and a vibe that transmits glamour even in its proximity to comfort.
When they were growing up, “Danielle was constantly ripping things out of magazines,” says Alana, “and we would all go to the thrift stores and $1 sales and search for something that remotely looked like what we were looking at in magazines, a 95 per cent of the time we would cut things up. We would take a long dress and cut the bottom, and it would be so jagged, but to us it was like, ‘It’s perfect. It’s the mini dress, we found it.’
“She was the fashion sister. I was the puppy sister.”
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Advertise with NZME.Este chimes in. “What does that make me?”
“You can take a minute and think about it,” quips Alana.
“We all have our own individual style,” says Este, pinning that thought, “but we also all wear the same thing, too. We have a collective closet.”
“It’s true,” agrees Alana. “Nothing that I’m wearing is mine.”
“What’s yours is mine, what’s mine is yours,” echoes Este, in wardrobe as in sibling roots.
Haim will play at St Jerome’s Laneway Festival on January 30 at Western Springs, Auckland. Tickets are available at Ticketmaster.co.nz
