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.”