It’s not hard to imagine the Haim sisters riding down a California freeway singing along to classic 90s R&B on the radio.
The Los Angeles trio’s debut album, Days Are Gone (Columbia/Sony), is layered with taut, exuberant harmonies sung with the disciplined precision of Destiny’s Child or TLC.
“Believe me, I wanted to wear a condom on my sunglasses when I was, like, three, and my parents were not down with that,” says keyboardist/guitarist Alana Haim, 21. “I wanted to be Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. So. Badly.”
It’s not uncommon for musicians to trace their first musical influences to preschool, but Alana can boast that she was a seasoned performer by elementary school. She and her older sisters Danielle, 25, and Este, 27, grew up in the San Fernando Valley playing covers of late 70s and 80s hits in a family band with their parents.
Seven years ago, they whittled down to Haim and started gigging around Los Angeles, sometimes playing three shows a month. It would take six years of ill-fated studio experimentation before they produced something they felt confident enough to release – last year’s three-track EP, Forever.
“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna put out something that’s gonna do a bunch of things,'” Alana says of the EP. “Literally, I was like, ‘I just want to put it out for free so we don’t have this reputation that we can’t record any more.'”
British radio quickly latched on. They won the BBC’s influential Sound Of 2013 poll, performed at SXSW and signed with Columbia in the U.S. and Polydor in the UK.
Their smart, accessible pop made them an extremely likeable group: A$AP Rocky asked them to be his backing band, and they performed with Primal Scream at Glastonbury. All the while, pressure mounted on the sisters to put out their debut, but they refused to act hastily.
“It took a lot of strength to do that,” explains Alana. “There are three of us, and we think we’re very strong women, kind of like a wolf pack. No one can really fuck with us. We were like, ‘If it’s not ready, then I’m sorry, we’re not giving it to you.'”
The record is out now, to rave reviews, and the group is booked around the world through March (though, sadly, there’s no Toronto show yet).
It was worth the wait.
“I’m so happy we did that,” Alana adds. “Because if we’d put it out any earlier than when we finished, it would’ve been a disaster.”
