‘Everyone is invited to be the fourth Haim sister’

“When are you interviewing Haim?” My sister Emily texts me one night. “I wanted you to ask me if I can be your fourth member.”

There’s only one problem: I also want to be the fourth member of Haim. And we are not alone. Taylor Swift and actress Brie Larson have also pleaded for the position.

Fellow Oscar winner Emma Stone even teamed up with them for a Spice Girls tribute, although sadly it wasn’t a permanent deal.

Clearly something is happening.

Sisters Este, Danielle and Alana began their careers playing at local delis with their parents. Now there are several Grammy nominees.

Like all the best bands, they are a tight-knit bunch. Their videos often show them walking in unison through the streets of Los Angeles. On stage, they play with such joy that you can’t help but think, “I want to be a part of that too.”

“The number of times on tour that young girls would come up to us and say, ‘After your show, I bought a guitar, I picked up drumsticks, I picked up a bass,'” says Alana, the youngest of the Haim siblings. “That’s the biggest honor. It’s an award in itself. We’ve done our job if we can inspire young girls to start a band.”

“So everyone is invited to be the fourth Haim sister.”

(Emily, you’re in!)

The band called the BBC from home, where they are resting after an extensive tour promoting their fourth album, I Quit.

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

“I watch the nominations every year, so when your name is read I feel like I’m on The Truman Show,” Alana says. “I had to call my sisters to say, ‘Did I hear this right or am I hallucinating?'”

The importance of the nomination does not go unnoticed by the trio.

“This time we really set out to make a rock album, so it’s a big milestone,” says Alana. “But we’re just grateful for the women who came before us.

“All we admired were female rock artists,” Este adds. “That was our world, growing up, whether it was Stevie Nicks, Joni Mitchell or Pat Benatar.”

The album emerged from a period of emotional turmoil. The three sisters found themselves single, and the music inhabits that strange liminal space where you feel relieved to be free, but not quite ready to move on.

“Can I have your attention, please, one last time before I leave?” sings Danielle, over an American-style acoustic guitar on the opening track, Gone.

So: “Thinking about it, I changed my mind.“

This takes over the voice in Cry and follows his progress through the seven stages of grief. “I’m over the anger, I’m over the rage / But the pain hasn’t gone away“.

There are many departures, many goodbyes. Sisters want love, but not the specific love they have. You can hear them determine in real time who they want to be and refuse to be defined by how others see them.

“I love that description, yeah,” Danielle says. “I Quit is kind of a mantra. You have to actively work to silence the noise and say, ‘I don’t give a damn.’ [expletive] what people think’.

“When we were 20 years old, I didn’t have enough strength to say something like that,” Alana says, returning to the topic.

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

“But when we get to Renuncio, I’m like, ‘Screw this, I’m done.’ And with that comes an inner strength that I’m very proud to have.”

That harshness required a new sound, more raw and immediate than anything the band had done before.

For Danielle, who co-produced the album with former Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij, that started with the drums.

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 Figure Me Out, he even tuned his drum to match the “iconic” beat of U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.

“Drums have many nuances and I care a lot about them,” he says, as if that weren’t already clear.

“‘The Drum Sound Journey’ will be the name of our memoirs,” Alana laughs.

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

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

I Quit’s first single, Relationships, is a bright pop that first came to Danielle on a flight home from Haim’s 2017 Australian tour.

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

By contrast, Take Me Back was made up on the spot, as the band shared raucous stories from their high school days: of 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,” Alana says. “We didn’t even know if it was going to appear on the album.

“It was just us riffing from the heart and saying, ‘This is the kind of song we want to make today,’ with no pressure. We laughed throughout the whole experience.

“In the end, we thought, ‘This is so funny, we have to put it on the album.'”

That openness inspired the album’s promotional campaign, where the sisters shared some of their dating horror stories.

“A man broke up with Este when she told him that her future children might have type 1 diabetes. He said to me, ‘So why are we here?'” she recalls.

Alana shared the story of her trip to London to spend New Year’s Eve with a musician she thought she was dating, only to have him high-five her at midnight.

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

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

“When you go through these heartbreaks, you feel like there is no light,” Alana says.

“So being able to laugh at those stories and share them with other people, and then have them tell you even crazier stories, is amazing.

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

It’s not difficult to sense a change in the band. When we first met in 2012, they were still wet behind the ears and giddy from their debut at London’s O2 Arena.

Opening for Florence + The Machine, the sisters were overwhelmed to realize they had just played on the same stage as the Rolling Stones.

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

Today, Haim is more confident in his place in the rock pantheon.

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

Not only that, but they also succeed in acting (Alana just got “shot in the head by Sean Penn” in One Battle After Another) and soundtrack (Este’s credits include The White Lotus and Loot).

But Haim will always be his number one priority.

“My brothers and I have been playing music since I was four years old,” Alana says.

“It’s like there’s nothing else we’re supposed to do. And I’m so grateful that we’ve made it this far and that we’re still kicking.”