‘Everyone is invited to be the fourth Haim sister’

“When are you going to interview Haim?” my sister Emily texted me late one night. “I wanted you to ask if I could be their fourth member.”

There’s only one problem: I want to be the fourth member of Haim, too. And we are not alone. Taylor Swift and actor Brie Larson They also begged for the position.

Even Oscar winner Emma Stone also met with them. In memory of the Spice Girls but unfortunately this was not a permanent agreement.

There’s clearly something going on.

Sisters Este, Danielle and Alana started their careers performing at local delis with their parents. They are now multiple Grammy nominees.

Like all the best bands, they’re a tight-knit gang. Their videos often show them walking together through the streets of Los Angeles. They play on stage with such unlimited joy that you can’t help but think, “I want to be a part of this, too.”

“On tour, young girls would come up to us and say, ‘After your show, I bought a guitar, I bought drumsticks, I bought a bass,'” says Alana, the youngest of the Haim siblings. “This is the biggest honour. This is a reward in itself. If we can inspire young girls to form a band, we’ve done our job.”

“So everyone is invited to become the fourth Chaim sister.”

(Emily, you too!)

The band called in to the BBC from their resting house following their extensive tour in support of their fourth album, I Quit.

They are currently reeling from the news that they have been nominated for best rock album at the Grammys, making Haim the first all-female band to compete for the award.

“I watch the nominations every year, so when your name is read it feels like you’re in the Truman Show,” says Alana. “I called my sisters and said, ‘Did I hear that right or am I hallucinating?’ “I had to ask.”

The importance of the nomination was not lost on the trio.

“This time we really decided to make a rock album, so this is a huge turning point,” says Alana. “But we are grateful to the women who came before us.

“The only thing we looked up to was female rock artists,” Este adds. “That was our world growing up, whether it was Stevie Nicks, Joni Mitchell, Pat Benatar.”

The record emerged from a period of emotional turmoil. All three sisters have found themselves single, and the music lives in that weird liminal space where you’re relieved to be free but not quite ready to move on with your life.

“Please, can I have your attention one last time before I leave?“,” says Danielle over an Americana-style acoustic guitar on the opening track, Gone.

Later: “On second thought, I changed my mind.“

Este takes over the vocals for Cry and follows her progression through the seven stages of grief. “I’m past the anger, past the rage / But the pain isn’t gone“

There are many departures, many farewells. Sisters want love, but not the specific love they have. You can hear them trying to figure out who they want to be in real time and refusing to be defined by how others see them.

“I love that description, yes,” says Danielle. “I quit is kind of like a mantra. You have to actively work to quiet the noise and say, ‘I don’t care.’ [expletive] What do people think?

Addressing the issue, Alana says, “I wasn’t strong enough to say something like that when we were in our 20s.”

“I was more like, ‘Oh, please love me.’

“But when we get to I Quit, I’m like, ‘Forget it, I’m done.’ And with that comes an inner strength that I’m proud to have.”

This solidity required a new voice; more raw and immediate than anything the band had done before.

For Danielle, who co-produced the album, starting with drums, with Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of Vampire Weekend.

He plays an acoustic kit on each track, often layering multiple takes recorded in different studios to capture specific tones. On Everybody’s Trying to Understand Me, he even adjusted his snare drum to match the “iconic” beat of U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.

“Drums are such a subtle thing and I care about them so much,” he says, as if that wasn’t already obvious enough.

Alana laughs: “‘The journey of the drumbeat’ will be the name of our memories.”

“I’ve said this a million times, our albums don’t start until we find the perfect drum sound and then we can continue our journey of writing the songs.”

The evolution of Haim’s voice also helped them grasp songs that had slipped through their fingers over the past decade.

I Quit’s first single, Relationships, is a brilliant earworm that first came to Danielle on her way home from Haim’s 2017 Australian tour.

In the intervening years, the song went through “hundreds” of rewrites, changing lyrics and tempo, before finally “coming to life” in Batmanglij’s home studio.

Take Me Back, by contrast, was made up on the fly as the band shared raucous stories from their high school days about boys who couldn’t perform in bed and friends who lost control of their bowels “in the back of a truck.”

“This fell into place very quickly,” says Alana. “We didn’t even know if it was going to be on the album.

“We were just singing our hearts out and saying, without any pressure, ‘This is the kind of song we want to do today.’ We were laughing throughout the whole experience.

“We finally said, ‘This is so funny, we should put this on the album.'”

This candor inspired the album’s promotional campaign, in which the sisters shared some of their dating horror stories.

A man broke up with Este after she told him their future child might have Type 1 Diabetes. ‘Then why are we here?’ ” he asked,” he recalls.

Alana shared the story of going to London to spend New Year’s Eve with a musician she thought she was dating, but he high-fived her at midnight.

During the tour, fans shared their own disaster stories on Haim’s video screens.

Among them was a girl in Philadelphia who discovered that her boyfriend’s private safe contained neither money nor a passport, but was instead a shrine dedicated to his ex and his mother.

“When you’re going through these heartbreaks, it feels like there’s no light,” says Alana.

‘It’s so amazing to be able to laugh at these stories, share them with other people, and then have them tell you even crazier stories.

“We can laugh about all this and it won’t stop us from trying to find love in the future.”

It’s not hard to feel a change in the group. we met for the first time They were still wet behind the ears and dazed from their debut at London’s O2 Arena in 2012.

The sisters, who are Florence + The Machine’s backing band, were stunned to realize they were playing on the same stage as The Rolling Stones.

“I was crawling on the floor trying to take it all in,” Alana said. “I think there’s a little Mick Jagger in me.”

Haim is more confident of their place in the rock pantheon these days.

They are the festival headliners, with two number-one albums and an international fan base.

Not only that, but she also has successful side work in acting (Alana was “shot in the head by Sean Penn” in One Battle After Another) and film scoring work (Este’s credits include The White Lotus and Loot).

But Haim will always be their number one priority.

“Me and my siblings have been playing music since I was four years old,” says Alana.

“It’s like there’s nothing else we need to do. And I’m really grateful that we got here and we’re still fighting.”