May 3, 2025

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by Hazel Cills

While your regular newsletter author, Ann Powers, is out of the office, members of NPR Music’s team have been taking a close look at songs that have captured our fascination. Ann returns next week, but first, Hazel Cills spends some time with new songs by three L.A.-based sisters and comes away wondering whether their upcoming fourth album might be poised to throw out the group’s own well-established rules.

Terrence O'Connor

Has Haim ever been truly unpredictable? Chaotic? Messy?

I don’t think so. When I think of Haim, the first word that comes to mind is reliable. The band is composed of three sisters: a family act with the sort of wholesome backstory that begins with playing in their parents’ wedding cover band in what would make for a cute 1970s sitcom. Danielle, Este and Alana can seemingly do every single thing you can do in a band, singing and trading instruments on each of their songs with dizzying proficiency (and not to mention act, thank you Paul Thomas Anderson). And their approach as musicians is so reliably excellent in part because they frequently borrow from the reliably excellent bands of the 1970s and ’80s that the sisters grew up listening to and literally covering: the thundering drums of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, The Eagles laid-back rock, Heart’s electrifying bravado.

For Haim, all those influences come together in a slick, festival-friendly sound that’s warm and familiar, with universal pop songwriting that’s uncomplicated and razor sharp in structure. I rarely hear someone slip in a Haim song, a chorus that doesn’t land, a production flourish that feels genuinely leftfield. All the parts of a Haim song always lock together with technical precision in a seamless, tight piece of music. Which isn’t to say that the band’s music is boring, necessarily, just that Haim has the benefit of being a group that successfully drew up its blueprint over a decade ago and largely hasn’t strayed from it. The group’s third album, 2020’s Women in Music, Pt. III, did expand Haim’s repertoire beyond the blindingly sunny, retro rock of 2017’s Something to Tell You into a cooler, far more modern, R&B-inflected sound, but the album’s biggest tracks like “The Steps” and “Don’t Wanna” would have sat comfortably on its 2013 debut. For the better part of a decade, Haim had managed to stay in step along a narrow path.

Until now. In the last few months, the band has released three singles from a new album titled I quit: the sleek, ’90s girl group song “Relationships,” “Everybody’s trying to figure me out” and “Down to be wrong,” each co-produced by Rostam Batmanglij. The press campaign and album title has telegraphed that we might be getting a different Haim this album cycle, maybe a Haim that isn’t as married to perfectionism (the candid, out-of-focus album art, shot by Anderson, features the band through the glare of a shop window wearing second hand dresses Danielle bought “2 hours before our shoot”). I actually hear that reality the most on “Everybody’s trying to figure me out,” a song that picks up where the more experimental aspects of Women in Music, Pt. III left off and spins Haim out even further into a spiral of existential questioning.

“Everybody's tryna figure me out now / And I don't know why,” Danielle sings, her voice cracking, on a song that sounds more like the singer-songwriter is having a conversation with herself to which we listeners are simply eavesdroppers than writing a pop single. Every time you think “Everybody’s trying to figure me out” might cohere into some catchy, recognizable pattern, it sort of zags past more tidy, commercial choices, its guitar riff and steady, spiky drumming picking up to bolster Danielle’s anxious ruminations (“Oh my god, I feel like I might live inside everyone’s thoughts”).

“Everybody’s trying to figure me out” doesn’t sound like typical Haim. It sounds loose, a bit raw — messy. Maybe that’s the influence of Bon Iver's Justin Vernon, a credited writer on the song and an artist who recently went through his own minor reinvention on the joyful SABLE, fABLE (which also features prominent contributions from Danielle). As Danielle twists her thoughts in her brain, at first afraid of them, then remembering she’ll be alright, its meandering lyricism mirroring her mini crisis, “Everybody’s trying to figure me out” works. For a band who has for so long pursued and nailed buttoned-up perfection, Haim is learning that sometimes they can, and should, veer off course.

More stories from NPR Music

Last Sunday, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame announced its class of new inductees for 2025. They include The White Stripes, Cyndi Lauper, OutKast and at least one musician who bought a full-page ad in Billboard in 2001 lobbying for the spot he’ll finally occupy two dozen years later.
Quick, name the artist who performs the shortest song to ever appear on the Billboard Hot 100. If you didn’t say Jack Black, as of this week, you’d be wrong. Our chart watcher Stephen Thompson has the scoop on the new record-holder in his column this week.
Willie Nelson is 92 years old. Last week he put out his 77th solo album. To mark the occasion, but also just simply because Nelson is a treasure who has remained remarkably relevant and astonishingly prolific, Santi Elijah Holley wrote a beautiful essay about why Nelson’s longstanding impulse to swim against the current in Nashville defines his career.
Last weekend, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. hosted the annual concert celebrating the year’s class of NEA Jazz Masters. Nate Chinen attended the concert, and wrote afterwards that at a moment when both the NEA and the Kennedy Center are facing uncertain futures, it was a show shouldering layers of meaning.
Rachel Martin has been interviewing a wide array of fascinating artists on her podcast Wild Card, and this week her guest was “Weird Al” Yankovic. It’s obviously hilarious and surprisingly touching and why aren’t you watching it already?
You might be aware that the federal criminal trial of Sean Combs, on charges that include sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, is scheduled to begin next week. If you want to keep up with what happens in the courtroom in New York, you'll find ongoing coverage of the trial at NPR Music’s website.

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