Music
10 Best HAIM Songs
To celebrate the release of their sophomore effort "Something to Tell You," we're celebrating our favorite tracks from the California trio.
Are HAIM the last pop-rock band standing? That seems crazy to say, but when you take the temperature of the rest of the industry, they make a pretty compelling argument. The Black Keys punch the clock with the usual Danger Mouse dirty blues, Arcade Fire are on another post-modern spirit journey, The War on Drugs pen 12-minute meditations on the fragments of life — it’s not to say that HAIM aren’t capable of capable of similar artistry, but they present their findings with a distinct love for melody. Debut album “Days Are Gone” blew our minds with a suite of winsome jams that were about as tasteful as they were saccharine, and in the four years since the HAIM sisters have turned themselves into bona fide celebrities. You know you’ve made it when you’re featured on the hallowed Taylor Swift Instagram.
HAIM’s sophomore album “Something to Tell You” is a little more harried and tortured than the black-and-white love songs they used to write. But the sisters are still scaling egalitarian heights and putting a distinct delectation at the center of their craft. There’s a bravery in making music that is meant to be enjoyed, so here are HAIM's 10 best moments.
10. “Keep Me Crying”
The answer, as always, is to stop. Hang up the phone. Delete the number. Block them on Twitter and Facebook. If only it was that easy, right? HAIM agrees. “Now I’m only someone you call, when it’s late enough to forget,” they sigh, furious at themselves for picking up. The sisters squeeze their agony through a narrow vocoder, like a retrofitted Fleetwood elegy punctuated with an earth-shattering Rick Rubin handclap. “Keep Me Crying” is one of the most wrenching sagas on “Something to Tell You” and it’s refreshing to know even the rich and famous still get bogged down in situationships that are stupid and impossible to explain.
9. “Nothing’s Wrong”
The title is a cruel joke. “How could you tell me nothing’s wrong, it was good but now it’s gone.” HAIM excise the crucial words and reflect exactly how blindsided it feels to learn that no, things are not going as well as you thought and yes, all the paranoia is totally justified and real. The sisters serve up the derangement with a delicious, digestible blues-lite guitar melody and a smooth jazz gauze — atom-bomb access like “sleeping back to back, you’re turning away” shouldn’t be this catchy.
8. “My Song 5”
If you were asked to sum up HAIM's overall aesthetic in a single sound, your best bet might be the chopped-and-screwed “honey, I’m not your honeypie” guarding the gates on “My Song 5.” (A close second might be the staccato “I’VE. BEEN. LIED. TO. SO. WHAT’S. THE. TRUTH.”) It’s silly, powerful and tacitly aware of the cosmopolitan textures of pop music over the past decade or so. HAIM are experts at borrowing exactly what’s useful from everything they catch in their sieve when they hit the studio.
7. “Ready For You”
In which HAIM finally hook up with a wayward soul after bouncing off each other dozens of times at house parties and Twitter DMs. The rest of “Something to Tell You” is built on the bones of previous relationships, but “Ready For You” is centered squarely on newfound fidelity with someone new. It’s a sigh of relief, and the sisters reflect that with a stargazing synthesizer beam and a vintage guitar bounce.
6. “Forever”
The opening argument on “Forever” is hilarious. “Hey you! Remember me? Remember love?” It’s a story about regrouping with someone you’ve always adored who’s been sequestered by life’s priorities (or maybe just a really bad, drunk night.) But as the second track on “Days Are Gone,” that little corner of flirtatious poetry also served as a sign of good faith. For those tired of clinical, sad-sack rock music, HAIM are here to save you. You’ve gotta love a rock band that introduces themselves to your life by asking if you remember love.
5. “Want You Back”
In typical rockstar fashion, HAIM saved their first moments of doubt and troubled self-reflection for their sophomore record, “Something to Tell You.” After all, it’s hard to ache when you’re on top of the world for the first time. The best thing to come out of their newfound anxiety is “Want You Back,” a banger of a breakup song that’s immediately entered the canon for gauntlet-throwing mixtape statements. “I’ll give you all the love I never gave before I left you.” Oof.
4. “Right Now”
There’s no clearer evidence of the evaporating levity of “Something to Tell You” quite like the penultimate track “Right Now.” It is aggressively, patiently spare, which is surprising because it’s about a joker crawling back to your love after they left you alone and desperate a few months before. HAIM would be justified in penning a roundhouse kiss-off like “I Will Survive” or “Never Going Back Again.” But they don’t. “Right Now” is about tenderness, rage and the limits of our empathy. Those things are beautiful and serious and HAIM follow suit.
3. “Little of Your Love”
HAIM does doo-wop! It was only a matter of time. Structurally, as three young women united by a last name and a composite San Fernando ennui, HAIM have always felt a few degrees from a modern Wall Of Sound girl group. And while that thinking is reductive and robs the sisters of their artistic agency, that doesn’t mean they don’t tap into the aesthetic when it works. On “Little of Your Love” they heap on a load of low-end drums and a distant nursery-rhyme grand piano. They yearn the way Ronnie Specter yearned, with a 2017 counterpunch snuck in around the corner. “Stop running your mouth like that, ‘cause you know I’m gonna give it right back.”
2. “The Wire”
The song that made HAIM famous and the reason you’re reading this list right now. It’s easy to forget just how ubiquitous “The Wire” was when it was released back in 2013, but that sparkling, impossible beat tore a warpath through every self-respecting indie rock blog in North America. A few months later journalists established that, despite their disheveled, holes-in-jeans mystique, the HAIM sisters were signed to a major label and were groomed for stardom from day one. But that didn’t matter. It never mattered. And songs like “The Wire” are why. It felt good, it felt right.
1. “Falling”
The best thing HAIM does are their tight, ping-ponging vocal melodies that manage to be technically impressive and giddily joyous. So if you were somehow still out on the sisters when their debut album “Days Are Gone” arrived in 2013, “Falling” put any lingering concerns to bed. Sticky, effervescent Spice Girls melodies guided by Angus Young-indebted shredding and Este’s deep, maroon bass — no rock song in recent memory that created more fans in its wake. “Falling’s” apogee was honest, and if you somehow resisted its charms, it’s high time you confronted your biases.
