Rhymes With Time

With a Paul Thomas Anderson music video, friends like Taylor Swift and Instagram accounts dedicated to their hair, fashion-world favourite retro indie rock band Haim are storming the charts with their vintage vibes

- Melena Ryzik

As a greeting, the Haim hug comes at you like a wave, fast and giddy. It’s a three-fer, embraces from each of the longhaired sisters, Alana, Danielle and Este, of this Los Angeles trio. They’ve descended on a Manhattan studio to record a version of their single, Want You Back, for Spotify. Their hugs help set a familial tone, but their musicianship is pure pro.

In a ‘90s flower-print dress and witchy boots, Este seized a vintage bass. “Gotta warm up the phalanges,” she said, playing a few licks of the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army. Her sisters, in classic rock tees (ZZ Top, Eurythmics) tucked into ripped jeans, joined in but changed the tune to Bjork’s Earth Intruders. “We are the Earth intruders, we are the sharpshooters,” they sang together.

In Spotify’s office on a summer Friday, they soon got down to business, unpacking Want You Back, a regretful lover’s plea set against shimmery, hopeful instrumentation, from its layered production — softening the drums, adding and subtracting microphones.

Haim (it rhymes with time), emerged in 2013 with the critical favorite Days Are Gone, and quickly made its name as a potently dreamy, hooky California group, with a Hollywood-worthy back story — the sisters started performing as children, in a family act with their parents. Now they’re something that’s not as common as it used to be: a major label rock band that takes the idea of being a rock band quite seriously.

While their vintage style made them fashion-world favorites, their music bridged the mainstream — one song was featured in a Target commercial — and the realm of painstakingly made, retro indie-rock. Soon they were opening for, and befriending, Taylor Swift, and receiving gifts of jewellery from Stevie Nicks, who anointed them as part of her sisterhood.