Haim say I quit as in, I’m done caring. Here’s an album based on all the oldest California-isms in the book: Seek and you will find. Live your truth. Let go of what does not serve you. Or, quoting Alana Haim in the press release, “Every single song has a theme of quitting something that isn’t working for us anymore.” I quit also proudly advertises its credentials as American rock’n’roll, quoting Abraham Lincoln and Bruce Springsteen in opener “Gone,” exploring acoustic folk with fresh attention on soon-to-be-underappreciated hits like “Love You Right” and “Blood on the Street,” and inviting co-producer Rostam Batmanglij’s love of vintage acoustic texture, breakbeats, and left-field sound design into a combination of influences that sometimes goes a little haywire.
That’s right, it’s those same girls who made Women in Music Pt. III: They sense your impulse to treat them like a grown-up Sweet Valley High triple threat doing a band because it really does make for great content—all that purposeful walking!—and they know it doesn’t matter how many stone-cold classic rock references you make or how many surreally cool Paul Thomas Anderson projects you star in, some people are never going to treat you like the other guys. Not that there’s anything wrong with making pop music! They are, in their own words, “becoming the band we’ve always wanted to be.”
Talk like this gives me a migraine, but as I understand it, I quit is announcing its intention to be as emotional, self-indulgent, conflicted, silly, stoned, and heartsick as any woman on Stevie Nicks’ green Earth has a right to be. Like MUNA, Haim are chanting a hook about doing “what[ever] I want.” Like on Solar Power, they’re interpolating one of George Michael’s all-time biggest hits. (“HAIM dug deeper into the pop archives and sampled… ‘Freedom! ’90,’” writes the author of this album’s official bio, who’s never been below sea level.) The sound is sturdy but a little more laid-back, even for this famously sun-dazed group. The problem is that I quit is uneven, even within songs: often equivocating instead of disarming, partially vested in several musical directions, sometimes landing a devastating blow, and sometimes vastly overshooting its lyrical ambitions.
Imagine going out with a bang: what you’d say, to whom. I quit starts so strong: “Can I have your attention please/For the last time before I leave?” Danielle Haim begins, and then, “On second thought I changed my mind.” As in real life, I quit’s declarative force is shadowed by indecision and the accumulated weight of all one’s previous choices. Or: “Wasting time driving through the Eastside/Doing my thing ’cause I can’t decide if we’re through,” as Haim put it to a dusty hopscotch beat on will-they-or-won’t-they-break-up lead single “Relationships,” a pool-party jam with an appropriately tortured backstory that pays off for a reportedly challenging recording process that overlapped Danielle and longtime producer Ariel Rechtshaid’s breakup.
The best songs on I quit zero in on the freedom of an overdue split, the mood of the much-memed Nicole Kidman paparazzi shot referenced in the “Relationships” single art. “I didn’t think it could be so easy till I left it behind,” belts the narrator of “Down to Be Wrong,” sounding heroic, boarding a one-way flight with an apathetic adieu. That main emotional register—I quit as in, I’m done caring—is accompanied by another crucial emotional register: You stopped caring first. “I swear you wouldn’t care/If I was covered in blood lying dead on the street,” goes “Blood on the Street,” a rustic, vivid, Cat Power-esque farewell to a hard-drinking ex that goes on to clarify, “It’s not that I’m holding a grudge.” Because that would mean caring. “I can count on my one hand all the times that you really made me feel free… but my hand’s stronger than how it was played,” Danielle sings. Devastating. Peace out.
What does I quit care about? It can’t resist a calculated dose of nostalgia: “Take Me Back” hews to a list-of-stuff format, flashing by like pages of a stranger’s yearbook while Rostam plays the glockenspiel, which sounds like 2008 indie rock. But the preeminent mood of rock nostalgia right now is shoegazing, and Haim deliever the fuzz-walled, MBV-tinted love song “Lucky Stars,” which hauls up the overburdened metaphor, “Trying to heal myself with all the/Roaring trains of change and doubt that/Pulled in the station.” Choo choo? It’s around this point that the album glides into a new-wavey frictionlessness—call it the Zooropa zone—where it begins to feel like nothing ever really happens.
A brutally honest edit might have reconsidered the more stylistically anonymous or lyrically thin concepts. “Lucky Stars,” “Million Years” (“I’d stop every war/Even if it takes a million years”), “Spinning,” and the bad Coldplay song/good Kelly Clarkson song “Cry” are B-sides struggling to compete with more nuanced counterparts like “Relationships” and “The Farm,” a warm, slack, acoustic breakup ballad that’s comfortable enough to get candid about just how tough it can be to walk away: “The distance keeps widening/Between what I let myself say/And what I feel.” The tender folksinging trio of “Love You Right” or the steady backing band supporting the jazz horns at the end of “Try to Feel My Pain” are the moments on I quit when Haim’s music feels most like a communal experience and least like a placeless video clip narrated from the front seat of a car.
This brings us, with reservations, to the final track, “Now It’s Time,” a bizarre combination of rigid boom-bap, swingless Madchester, a Rostam piano run, a Disney-worthy empowerment message (“The real barrier to break is the one I feel inside”), and as a kind of Hail Mary, an “In the Air Tonight”-style drum fill on the way to its own would-be “Freedom! ’90” breakthrough moment. It is, in a word, exhausting. At the very end, kind of buried in the mix, one of the Haims says, “Am I reaching out to say/I never gave two fucks anyway?” A wise question, and one we should all ask ourselves more often, particularly before sending texts.
With “Now It’s Time,” Haim appear to recognize the need for immediacy, for a way to recenter in the moment and prove Semisonic were right about new beginnings. But the real juice of life—and breakup songs—is in the tensions of caring and then not caring, of relationships that work and then don’t. On I quit, much of this action seems distant, as if fading in the rearview. But I’m just living my truth.
