Danielle Haim is in the middle of describing her songwriting process when her hotel phone rings. “One second,” she says.

Luckily, her sisters Alana and Este—who complete the band Haim—are there to keep the conversation going, bouncing off each other in perfect sync.

“You have a caller! Who is it?” Alana asks.
“Is it Mom?” Este wonders.
“It’s probably Mom,” Alana concludes.

Photo: Heidi Stanton

The trio has always been close, but their connection has never been clearer than on their fourth studio album, I Quit, out today. At first glance, the record—co-produced by Danielle and Rostam Batmanglij (formerly of Vampire Weekend)—is a breakup album. Across its 15 tracks, it moves from the excitement of new love to the pain of its end and the relief of moving on. But woven throughout is a sense of joy—from the George Michael-sampled opener “Gone” to the upbeat, Alana-led “Spinning,” all the way to the percussive closer “Now It’s Time.”

“I wish I could say there was some huge fight in my last relationship, but the truth is, we just drifted apart,” Danielle says of her split from Ariel Rechtshaid, who produced the band’s first three albums. “There’s still a lot of love there. We made great music together—he’s an incredible producer—but working with Rostam on this album gave me a new kind of strength. I really think it’s our best work yet.”

Photo: Terrence O’Connor

The group started working on I Quit soon after Danielle’s breakup, when she moved in with Alana—a moment captured in the ballad “The Farm.” It was the first time in over a decade that all three sisters were single at once. (Since then, Este has gotten engaged to tech entrepreneur Jonathan Levin.) “We were writing about exactly where we were in that moment,” Danielle says. “For me, it was about self-discovery—figuring out who I was. There was a lot of power in that.”

“The songwriting was easy. Living together? That was the hard part,” Alana admits. “We hadn’t shared a place since I was 16.” But eventually, the arrangement clicked. “It brought us back to this nostalgic space—going to bars, parties, just the three of us. No plus-ones.”

Photo: Paul Thomas Anderson

Nostalgia plays a big role on the album. The Haim sisters grew up in Valley Village, a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, and that setting shapes much of I Quit—from shoutouts to local streets (Ventura Boulevard, Kling Street) to the album cover, shot by fellow Valley native Paul Thomas Anderson.

Growing up near L.A.’s legendary music venues was another key part of their youth. Este, who worked at a restaurant, would dig through lost-and-found IDs to find fake ones for her and her sisters. “Este got me an ID, but I was 15 and the woman on it was 27. I still had braces,” Alana recalls. “I only used it to buy alcohol once before chickening out. The pressure was too much.” Sneaking into 21+ shows at the Troubadour—where headliners played to intimate crowds—was more her style.

“It felt like the world was ours,” Este reflects. “Then, 10 or 15 years later, we were back in that same place—all single, no one to answer to, just focusing on us and the music.”

That same energy has fueled the album’s promotion. On social media, they’ve called out bad behavior from men, embraced a carefree sexuality, and kept things refreshingly real.The band called out misogynists who doubt their musical abilities—a theme they also tackled on their previous album, Women in Music Pt. III. “Am I going to pretend the issues we wrote about last time just disappeared after we addressed them? No, but we already made a whole album about that,” Danielle says. Alana jumps in: “Now it’s time to… have fun!”

One track on I Quit was originally meant for WIMPIII: the catchy lead single “Relationships,” with its deceptively simple yet cutting lyrics like, “Why do I have a guilty conscience? / I’ve always been averse to conflict / But you really fucked with my confidence.” The group had been refining it for seven years—ever since Danielle started writing it on a flight to Australia—but they could never quite perfect it, and even those close to them dismissed it. (They compare it to other “problem children” that eventually became hits, like “The Wire” from Days Are Gone and “Want You Back” from Something to Tell You.) “We just had such a strong emotional connection to it,” Danielle says.

Looking back, they now see their struggle with “Relationships” as fate. “A lot of people didn’t get the song, but we really believed in it,” Alana says. “Now it’s clear—’Relationships’ was never meant for Women in Music. Maybe the universe was telling us, ‘Wait.'”