What’s more liberating than saying “I quit”? In 2025, HAIM threw caution to the wind, embraced singledom, spontaneity and oversharing, and came out the other side freer and more confident than ever. Their fourth album, ‘I quit’, arrived in late June, but the ‘fuck it’ attitude established on record wasn’t relegated to the grooves.
“I’ve never been this honest on an album,” says Alana. “I’ve told the craziest shit that I never in my life thought I would ever share, which includes farting, which includes being cheated on, it’s things that I was like, I’m taking this shit to my grave. And it has been the most beautiful thing to share them and then to have other people be like, babe, literally, same.”
We catch the trio as they round off their ‘I quit’ tour in Glasgow; it’s the final show, coinciding with Halloween, and the band are dialling in from their hotel rooms, feeling a bit emotional about it all. Ending the tour with the UK run just feels correct; the country is as much HAIM’s home as Los Angeles is, and it brings them right back to where this cycle began.
Back in March, HAIM paid London a visit to launch their new era with single ‘Relationships’, a track that had fallen down the back of the sofa several years ago. With a hand from producer Rostam, he helped them dig it out and clean it up, turning it into the perfect introduction to ‘I quit’.
“It just feels right to always start here, because it is where it literally started for us,” says Danielle. “Growing up, all of our favourite American bands also started in the UK, so it’s like the biggest joy that our trajectory is the same. I mean, I don’t want to rag on the states, but there’s like, a palpable energy in the crowd here, always.”
Despite playing every venue in LA that would let them, it was on this side of the Atlantic that HAIM found their initial success, even signing a deal in the UK before the US. Back in 2013, they celebrated the release of their debut album ‘Days Are Gone’ in the English capital; a decade later, they came back to London for an anniversary show at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. When it came to penning ‘I quit’, that nostalgic feeling was fervent, and the sisters found themselves looking back on their chaotic teenage experiences along with their rocky relationships.
“Nostalgia was a huge part of this album, too,” explains Danielle. “I don’t know what it is about nostalgia that is a fun topic to write it about. We wrote ‘Take Me Back’ about all of our high school shenanigans. It’s fun to try and relive moments of your past while writing songs. I definitely take from that a lot when I’m writing, I’m kind of recalling certain memories or certain feelings.”
“It was really just shooting our shot”
Reminiscing also brought HAIM back to (what sounds like) their favourite festival on earth, Glastonbury. A week after dropping ‘I quit’, the band popped up at Worthy Farm for a surprise set on the exact stage they made their Glasto debut on twelve years ago. Their love for the festival was mutual, and HAIM became instant legends there in just one trip.
“Playing Glastonbury was a huge highlight, because we got to play The Park stage again,” says Alana. “So it was again, that weird nostalgia thing, where we were kind of restarting from where we began in our careers. We were a secret set, so we were like, is anyone going to show up? And then it was the craziest crowd we’d ever played to. It’s just another reason why we love playing in the UK. I mean, you guys always show up for us.
“Our first year was pretty fucking legendary. It was like, show up to Glastonbury and be like, what is this place? And then play the Pyramid Stage; even at 11am, there were thousands of people there. At that point, the only festival I think I’d ever gone to was Coachella, and Coachella has nothing on Glastonbury. And then we played The Park stage, and the next day, we went back to Pyramid to play with Primal Scream, who are the greatest band ever. It felt like it could have been a movie, our first year. It felt like a very Almost Famous kind of situation.”
That spontaneous energy, whether it materialised as throwing a party in East London to drop a new single, or stopping by the world’s most famous festival for a quick run through of the new album, was present throughout the creation of ‘I quit’. The album cover – shot, again, by legendary LA director Paul Thomas Anderson – was put together in roughly a day, with Este snagging the location by walking into a random LA dry cleaners and telling the owner she was in a band and needed the place to shoot an album cover, tomorrow.
It worked, as did the band’s gall when it came to casting their music videos this era. The videos’ stars – a plethora of certified Internet Boyfriends, including Drew Starkey, Logan Lerman, and Will Poulter – were secured simply by the stars aligning.
“I mean, it was really just shooting our shot,” recalls Alana. “Let it be known, we shot our shot for like, a lot of people. There were so many times where we were so close to getting somebody, and they were shooting a movie or something. But starting with Drew Starkey was almost too peak. We were like, where do we go from here? Literally, our friend was at a party and was like, my friends are in this band called HAIM, and they really want you to be in their music video, will you do it? We had never met him before. We had never crossed paths. We were just like, this man is so hot. And at this party, through our friend, he was like, Oh my god, I’m down. I’ll never forget getting the call, being like, there’s no fucking way he’s gonna show up to this music video. Like, there’s no way. And then he did, and he was the most delightful, nicest… we threw him in real hard. I don’t think he had ever done a music video before, but he was just the greatest sport.
“Then I’ve been friends with Logan for years now, and I mean everyone that did our music videos, we owe them our lives. It really is a fun process, though, because I feel like it goes so fast. And everyone who was in was like, damn, this is how you guys do it. We only have a few hours, and we’re so used to it, but we were just extremely lucky. The choosing process was just having extreme luck; somebody up there was helping us, being like, we’re gonna make this happen. But it was so fun, because we had never really done that before, so it was really great to have a succession of, you know, very nice, young, strapping men in all of our music videos.”
On their last album, 2020’s ‘Women In Music Pt. III’, the opening track ‘Los Angeles’ had Danielle threatening to leave her home city. During the writing of ‘I quit’, she saw that through. For the first time in a long time, she’d found herself single, and with that, she’d headed East to spend two months in New York.
“New York is definitely better for just meeting anyone,” Danielle recalls. “Everything in LA’s very spread out. So a sublet came up randomly, and my friend was like, ‘Yeah, I’m leaving for two months, if you want to…’ And I was like, yeah, I do want to do that. It was so fun. Talking about the trials and tribulations of being single and rediscovering yourself, I definitely felt that way in New York.”
“How the fuck does this shit even happen?”
Much of this album cycle zooms in on Danielle as HAIM’s main character – she seems taken aback by the suggestion, and rebuts that Este and Alana, for the first time, have their own songs on ‘I quit’ too – and she effortlessly takes the lead in our chat. The second track revealed, ‘Everybody’s trying to figure me out’, takes the listener inside a panic attack and Danielle’s headspace while she finds her own way out of it; a change of pace from the relationship endings and beginnings that span the rest of the album, but captures that grabbing-life-by-the-horns feeling ‘I quit’ gets across.
“I don’t think it’s only being single. I think it’s also just being my age and growing up and spending a lot of my 20s in a relationship,” she says. “I think we’ve all gained confidence, even in this industry. After the ten-year anniversary of ‘Days Are Gone’, which was in 2023, I do feel like we finally could breathe a little bit more. Knowing that we’re still kicking and still making music that excites us. I think there was confidence in that, you know?”
Alana, on the other hand, is audibly disgusted by the idea that the record’s feelings of liberation could’ve come from getting older.
“I don’t think anything has to do with age, honestly,” she says. “If anything, we’re getting better as we age. But I hate talking about age. I think it’s so, blergh, I hate it, because I think you’re as young as you think you are. Being back in the UK, every time I step off the plane in Heathrow, I’m like, ‘I am 20 years old, like the day that I was when I got here’. I feel the same exact way. I just think this album was more about letting yourself be free and feel good about being in your own skin and being confident and knowing exactly what you want, when you want it, and not being afraid to say that. I think, yes, that comes with growing up, but it also just is, like, sometimes you pick yourself up and have a fucking adventure.”
Sure, that adventure took them around the globe again, but it also caught the attention of the Recording Academy, snagging HAIM their fifth Grammy nomination, this time for Best Rock Album. The nomination arrived shortly after the deluxe edition of ‘I quit’ dropped, featuring country-tinged slow jam ‘Tie you down’ in collaboration with Bon Iver, scuzzy garage rock tune ‘The story of us’, and the hindsight-ridden ‘Even the bad times’.
“We’ve had those songs for a while, and I think we were just holding on to them because we really wanted that extra cherry on top to this album,” says Alana. “My favourite is ‘The story of us’, because it was literally about my experiences with two of my ex-boyfriends. A couple years ago, I was dating this guy, and then he decided to go on a boys trip, and he hadn’t told me he loved me yet. And I’m like, I don’t care, go party. Like, I am not that gal that’s like, you have to stay home. I do my own things too, I’m on the road all the time. Like, go off.
“What I didn’t realise at the time was a boys trip, meant there was gonna be girls there as well! And he ended up cheating on me. He had clarity after he cheated on me and called me, and he was like, sounding really fucking weird, and I was so naive at the time, he was like, I love you, I just want to tell you, I love you. And I went, ‘Oh!’ Didn’t realise he had just cheated on me, and then told me that because he was afraid that I was going to find out. And then I found out years later, he had cheated on me.”
As the tour progressed, HAIM gathered an army of fans whose relationship stories were as ridiculous as their own. Each night, they put out a call on instagram for story submissions, then selected the girl who’s had the toughest time in love to have her moment on the big screen, the tale running along the top of the stage in red ticker tape as the band play ‘Relationships’. Finding the humour in these things has always been HAIM’s strong suit.
“The one thing I will say about this album, it was the most cathartic experience to just say the craziest stories that we’ve had dating, and also just being on tour, we’ve met so many of our fans now that have been our ‘Relationships’ girls. Some of the stories that we get, I’m like, why? Why do we even try? Yesterday, a girl, our ‘Relationships’ girl, says that she found dirty underwear in her boyfriend’s coat, in his pocket, and she found it, and he said, ‘Oh, that must be my sister’s’. Like, insane. When those things happen, you’re so devastated, but then with time, you find it so funny. You’re like, how the fuck does this shit even happen? And to also let people reclaim their stories and have a huge crowd of people clap for them for going through something as crazy as that is the most heartwarming experience.” ■
Taken from the December 2025 / January 2026 issue of Dork, out now.
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