Stevie Nicks told Haim to keep diaries. It was 2014, shortly before the three sisters from The Valley would begin writing their second album Something to Tell You, and at Nicks’ request, they were paying the Fleetwood Mac singer a visit at her mansion. When Nicks inquired, “Do you guys keep a journal?” the eldest Haim, bassist/singer Este, said she keeps notes on her phone. (Alana, Danielle, and Este all write lyrics.) But Nicks extolled the virtues of paper: On the right-hand page, you recount your day; on the left-hand page, you poeticize it.
The glossy and aching Something to Tell You—full of longing, betrayal, and the torment of feelings left unsaid—is at once poised and emo enough to suggest that Haim took Nicks’ advice, but drew from both sides of the diary. More to the point, this summit—a blessing from the high priestess of pop-rock heartbreak—was a testament to just how powerful Haim’s reverence of 1970s and ’80s soft-rock has become, proof that Haim are deeply admired within music’s pantheon and ever-closer to dominating the world at large. Collaborating with the trio recently, Bobby Gillespie called Haim “gospel singers” whose internal logic and virtuosic harmonizing comes from “this celestial telepathic thing.”
Something to Tell You—released exactly 10 years on from Haim’s first show together beyond their oldies family cover band Rockenhaim—does not radically depart from their taut and gleaming spark of a debut, 2013’s Days Are Gone. But there’s still nothing like Haim around. No other rock band in popular music (an anomalous statement already) has mixed styles so seamlessly—rattling and gliding from one hook to another—so as to garner a remix from Giorgio Moroder, a feature from A$AP Ferg, an onstage jam with Jenny Lewis, and an opening tour slot for Taylor Swift. Time collapses; Haim’s music is the distinct result of a band schooled by their parents on Motown and funk while TLC was on Top 40, fronted by Danielle, whose formative experiences included sneaking out to Rilo Kiley gigs.
Haim let in some new styles on Something to Tell You, but they crucially remain masters of rhythm. Though none of the sisters sit behind a kit at shows, and only Danielle handles drums in the studio, they were all drummers first, and Haim’s latticed arrangements and heavily percussive melodies make their music fly. There’s an unmistakable, crisply-strummed nod to George Michael’s “Faith” on “Ready for You.” “Little of Your Love” recalls the swaggering bubblegum notes of their former tour-mate, Swift. And “Kept Me Crying”—with its story of willfully, desperately hanging on the telephone for an ex-lover who hardly deserves it—yearns so irreducibly and with such a raw current of sadness that you could picture the Shangri-Las singing it, or a rhinestone cowgirl. “If you want me, I’m waiting for you,” Danielle sings. “You kept me crying for so long that my tears have dried.”
As ever, Haim’s dynamic songs are tricked out with plenty of studio magic, echoes, and shimmer; Ariel Rechtshaid returns to produce (“our fearless leader,” the credits read) along with touches from Rostam Batmanglij (“our biggest cheerleader”). Strange flourishes abound: pitch-shifted vocals all across the album; the blissfully perplexing likeness of a horse’s nay on “Want You Back”; the monotone mantra of “It’s obvious/Be honest” on “Nothing’s Wrong,” which nearly recalls UK post-punk band Au Pairs’ similarly robotic refrain. The emptied production and episodic structure of “Right Now” is also unusual, and this risk-taking makes it one of the best songs here. “Right Now” conveys the severe, almost nauseous feeling of love that goes frustratingly unresolved; the music has a wrongness about it and never quite settles. It just ends, and sometimes that’s all you get in life: the numb fadeout that lingers on until it turns into hard-earned wisdom. “Did you think this would be easy?” Danielle sings after the song crashes open. “Finally on the other side now/And I can see for miles.”
At the center of Something to Tell You is its peak, the Dev Hynes co-write “You Never Knew,” silver and incandescent, the disco ball beneath which the album grooves. Its mix of cascading, Rumours-like acoustic guitars with a deep, glitter-bomb beat makes it bob along gloriously, refracting all its romantic wreckage into heavy breaths and sparkles sharp enough to cut. In the lyrics, Danielle sorts through the mess of something that was too beautiful to last, of memories you can’t wrap your arm around. “Go on and say it,” she sings. “Was my love too much for you to take?/I guess you never knew what was good for you.” Her sisters slide into the mix with light-beam harmonies, like a finger-wagging girl gang behind her (“You couldn’t take it! You couldn’t take it!”). As with many Haim songs, there’s strength in their camaraderie; it makes even the most melancholy line sound doubly empowered.
“I need to hear you say it,” Danielle sings on “You Never Knew,” getting at the theme of this album and Haim generally: the exalted feeling of clarity. On their thrillingly disaffected Days Are Gone hit “The Wire,” Danielle sang, “I’m bad at communication/It’s the hardest thing for me to do.” Well, people dream of hearing things elucidated as plainly as some of the lyrics on Something to Tell You, like on the wild-hearted single “Want You Back.” Economical but often potent, the lyrics are about saying things straight—they sound like the very last words you’d arrive at in a difficult conversation when you want the truth. “Walking Away” is about as snappily-written a song as you could hope for about leaving someone in the dust. “Nothing’s Wrong” describes a love that is indeed so wrong it reminded me of the photographer Nan Goldin’s movingly distraught “Couple in Bed.” The downside of these broad lyrics, however, is that they can just as easily scan as dubiously pat or overly safe. But on the whole, Haim and their collaborators are remarkable architects of pop’s tightrope moments, suspended in air; they know exactly where to place a dash of overblown emotion, how to make a simple line take the air out of the room.
In 1997, Kathleen Hanna coined the phrase “Valley Girl Intelligentsia” to underscore how even a young person with an airy accent could be smart and capable. Haim—who have roots in a prefab mid-aughts major label band that was literally called Valli Girls—write songs so impeccably savvy and clear-headed that Something to Tell You feels like a sly pop-music manifestation of this idea. As on Days Are Gone, its sheen is current and its spirit out of step. Beat by beat, Haim are the classic sound of heartbreak alleviated, if only for a moment.
