Haim Dances Themselves Clean on Women in Music Pt. III
It’s been nearly three years since Este, Danielle, and Alana Haim released their third studio Album, Women In Music Pt. III. By record label standards, it seems like a music catalog refresh would be in order, especially given the world events wedged between today and June 2020, when the album was released. Since then, the world has experienced power shifts, global catastrophes, social reckonings and for some, a failed romance or two.
And yet Women In Music Pt. III has stood the test of time, a remarkable feat in the age of hyper-consumerism and shortened attention spans. It’s rare to behold a modern album that can sit comfortably beside vinyl shelf classics, but the Haim sisters have given us a shelf-stable record, a succor to a world splitting at the seams.
The Haim sisters are the driving force behind their band of the same name, Haim, a California-based pop-rock tryptic that’s essentially the walking essence of a family group chat. Growing up north of Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley was the Haim sisters’ backyard and the music scene was their playground. Their teenage years were spent sneaking into nightclubs with mouths full of braces and fake IDs, but rebellion was just a bonus. They really just wanted to see Phantogram play the 10 p.m. slot on the Sunset Strip.
Eschewing middle-America’s typical after-school tradition of enrolling in ballet class or joining the soccer team, they played in their family band, Rockinhaim. Flanked by their dad on the drums and mom on the guitar, Rockinhaim performed their first concert for the dinner crowd at Canter's Deli, whose ornamental sausages and chalky ceiling panels would become the nostalgic vignette gracing the cover of Women in Music Pt. III.
Leaning into nostalgia was a fitting choice for Haim, since much of Women in Music Pt. III is dedicated to looking back. On the album, the sisters chronicle their curses and blessings with lyrics that capture their experience grappling with sickness, living through loss, and feeling the pangs of loneliness. But despite the album’s startling relatability and lyrical authenticity, it feels like it was made for a dance floor.
The sisters sing like they’re sifting through therapy notes while catching confetti, a paradoxical melding of real-life hardship with real-life joy. With a single shift of beat, Haim throws a lyrical sucker-punch, then serves up a twangy guitar groove that lands like a high-five. So how does Haim balance life’s pain points with what sounds like coruscating joy? Through each other.
The album opens with Danielle’s vocals on Los Angeles, a doleful reflection on feeling frustration with the city that is, to her surprise, crushing her. Despite her lyrical desperation, the track feels like sunshine diffused on a surf-shack. It’s punctuated by a mellow saxophone riff and low vibrations from a bass line plucked out by Este, who supports her sister’s unrestrained honesty with empathy found through harmony.
Each song proves that the Haim sisters have a layered camaraderie that can’t be contrived by a record label but found only through a mutual, abiding care that runs as thick as blood. Their depth and solidarity is shared through music—a sisterly love offered in the form of instrumental lilt among the dark circumstances they would otherwise face alone.
It’s an album that can be spun on a turntable or left to flow through the wires of an aux cord, but no matter how it’s heard, it’s an album that feels like a night with friends fueled by bellylaughs, loud shrills of excitement, and tequila. When the sun comes up, hard circumstances haven’t changed, but the tightness of friendship continues to stand as a safe fortress when walking into the daylight of reality.
Women in Music Pt. III is Haim’s strongest album to date, enough to tide us over as we await their answer to the changing landscape of the past three years. In suspense, one thing is certain: we can expect the sisters to return to grace us with more sparkling evidence of their collaborative talent, drumsticks and guitars in hand.