The best song of 2025 is not about artificial intelligence, Donald Trump, global conflicts or any other of the year’s defining topics. It is an old-fashioned summer smash about relationships: what they mean, why they’re hard to talk about and whether you even want to be in one. Relationships by Haim, three sisters from Los Angeles who formed the band as teenagers after getting fed up with being roped in as backing musicians for their parents’ covers act, is a charming slice of pop-funk with touches of Fleetwood Mac’s soft-rock breeziness. Ultralight, hinting at hidden depths: the perfect song.
“Wasting time, driving through the Eastside,” middle sister and guitarist Danielle Haim sings on this lead single from Haim’s fourth album, I Quit. “Doing my thing cos I can’t decide if we’re through.” It has been widely interpreted as being about Danielle’s split in 2022 from Ariel Rechtshaid, the producer for Haim’s first three albums. The only thing is, she came up with it in 2017.
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“I was on an airplane from Australia,” says Danielle, 36, speaking from the house in LA she shares with her little sister Alana, 34, star of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 coming-of-age comedy Licorice Pizza. “For some reason, when planes are taking off I get inspired, and even though it was really noisy I had the chords and the melody in five minutes. I kept singing, ‘relationships …’ There is a feeling that comes to a songwriter about once every five years, when you know you have something special. Most songs come from me and my sisters going into the studio to jam. This came out of thin air.”
The Haims with Taylor Swift in California during Swift’s Eras tour
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From there Danielle hooked up with the musician Tobias Jesso Jr, an old friend who in 2015 wrote Goon, a Randy Newman-like album about his own relationship falling apart. Jesso Jr has since become a songwriter to the stars, Adele and Justin Bieber among them. “I went over to his place and we banged out the lyrics in an afternoon. Then it took almost ten years of fine-tuning.”
In a sense, Relationships is about growing up. The narrator frets about whether being in love is just one big hassle, if she’s repeating the patterns of her parents, if it is worth settling down with someone at all. You have to wonder, given that people in bands are generally in a state of arrested development — and all the travelling they do makes dating difficult in the first place — whether it is autobiographical.
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“Yes, but it was a stream of consciousness,” says Danielle, who was with Rechtshaid when she wrote the song, but single by the time it was released. “When me and my siblings write, our brains shut off and our true feelings come out. When I first wrote it, I didn’t think there was any sadness to relationships. Now I look back and think, oh yeah, I didn’t love where I was at that point. My brain knew before my body did.”
Bass-playing older sister Este Haim, 39, is in a relationship. She’s engaged to Jonathan Levin, the head of a tech company. “I heard it and said, we have to do this,” Este says. Alana adds: “The universe was holding the song back so it could start a new chapter. Relationships was the kick-off for the album.”
All three agree that I Quit marks a new era for the band, who have previously collaborated with Taylor Swift and Bon Iver. After a decade of being stuck on the hamster wheel of touring, recording and criticising themselves, they realised they could do things another way.
“That was the theme of the album: letting go of things that are taxing on our souls and our brains,” Alana says. “We’re people pleasers, full of anxiety. I have a routine: wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, pick myself apart. I’ll have a great night out, then get into bed and think, why was I so loud? Why was I speaking too much — like I’m doing right now?”
Danielle, Alana and Este at this year’s Paris Fashion Week
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Haim are excellent company, disarmingly casual and breezily cheerful. When I mention that I have a massive spot on my nose that won’t go away, Este shares an elaborate skincare routine before revealing that she’s suffered from cystic acne since her teens. Alana berates herself for having the best job in the world and still not allowing herself to enjoy it. Danielle, who had a previous career as the guitarist for Julian Casablancas of the Strokes (in his solo phase), says she always knew she wanted to be in a band with her sisters.
“For the first five years we were playing to three or four people,” Danielle says. “But something about getting on a stage together made us happy.”
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“It was our evil plan,” Este adds. “Growing up, we hadn’t seen much of anything. We wanted to discover the music scene in the UK, to visit Japan, but how the f*** are we going to afford it? If we start writing songs together, maybe we can.”
The sisters grew up in San Fernando Valley, a middle-class neighbourhood of Los Angeles that was put on the map in 1982 by Frank Zappa’s hit song Valley Girl, in which his 14-year-old daughter Moon Unit emulated the nonsensical phrases of the popular girls at her school, like “gag me with a spoon!” and “for sure, for sure”. It cemented a stereotype of Valley Girls as airheaded narcissists whose chief goal in life was to hang out at the mall and get their nails done. But Haim came from a hard-working world: from a young age they were forced to back their parents, Donna and Moti (a singer/guitarist and drummer), in their own musical efforts.
“Now I think it’s cute,” Este says, “but when you’re 13, being forced to be in a band with your parents and little sisters is not the coolest thing.”
“Not to be too LA about it but it was a form of manifestation,” Alana says of the girls sacking off their parents and launching their own band. “Starting Haim, we had blind optimism. We just thought it was going to work.”
Danielle, the quietest and most circumspect of the three, isn’t so sure. “When we were four years in, still playing to five people, I was thinking, maybe we should think again …”
Danielle Haim
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Alana says early days were like the classic rock comedy Almost Famous, piling into a van, going from place to place. The breakout moment was Glastonbury 2013, when Haim were popping up everywhere: playing at the Pyramid and Park stages, appearing as backing singers for Primal Scream. In all the excitement Este, who is diabetic, forgot to eat anything and “almost died” on stage. She felt her arms go numb and had to rush off before collapsing.
“We had only seen Glastonbury in photos and I couldn’t believe I was there,” Danielle says. “I was walking around, going, ‘Where is Kate Moss?’”
“Coming back this year was freaky for me,” Alana says of Haim’s secret set at the Park Stage this summer, one of the biggest moments of the festival. “I always get lost at Glastonbury and hadn’t been back to the Park, so I was returning to the moment of little Alana in 2013, so scared to be up there. Now we’ve done Glastonbury four times and every year feels like the best ever.”
Alana is presumably a lot less scared than she used to be, having been celebrated for her bravura performance as the permanently exasperated character of the same name, and love interest to Cooper Hoffman’s teenage hustler in Licorice Pizza. It portrays life in San Fernando Valley in 1973 as a world of suburban, carefree fun: pinball arcades, waterbed shops, muscle cars, bars with names like Tail o’ the Cock. Was their childhood similar to the world depicted in the film?
Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman in Licorice Pizza (2021)
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“It’s a glamorised version,” Alana says. “We definitely weren’t getting on our bikes and riding off. When we lived in the Valley, there were no kids in our neighbourhood.”
Where were the kids? “There just weren’t any places to go and hang out,” Este says. “Everything is really, really far away, so it was just us, kicking a ball in the backyard.”
The Valley is the place where the worker bees of the entertainment industry live: not the stars or studio moguls but crew members, backing musicians. “People from LA proper don’t like people from the Valley,” Alana explains. “But Valley kids stick together, which led us to Paul Thomas Anderson, who grew up in the Valley, who changed our lives.”
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“Dude, we’ve got Tom Petty,” Este boasts. “He filmed the video to Free Fallin’ on Ventura Boulevard. That was the beginning of our uphill battle to become cool Valley girls. For sure.”
The area shaped Haim, “the puzzle piece that doesn’t fit” according to Danielle, who says their genre-free sound is a product of long drives through the neighbourhood, listening to the radio. “When we were coming up in the early 2000s, a lot of the musicians were into one certain type of music. If you liked jazz, you talked shit about rock. If you liked rock, you talked shit about indie. But I remember hearing Hey Ya! by Outkast on the radio, which melds all these different styles, and realised you could go beyond genre.”
Of course, the relationships between the three sisters in Haim define the band too. Alana says they share a telepathy that simply isn’t there with others. “Maybe it’s a sister thing, because the history of brothers in bands has not been so great.”Este says she is both the most sensitive and the most protective of the three. “Although I have a hard time standing up for myself. I’m not sure why. I’ll unpack it with my therapist later, but birth order is a hot topic of conversation in LA and we fit the bill. The eldest child is protective, and that’s me. The middle child goes out and explores the world, which is Danielle. The youngest holds it all together, and that’s Alana.”
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Haim are also an old-fashioned band, based around guitars, bass and drums. Relationships is a classic pop song that could have been a hit at any point over the past few decades. Given that they have all put in the 10,000 hours learning their craft, how do they feel about the rise of AI?
“It’s extremely hard to put your thoughts and feelings into song,” Danielle says, making a case for human expression in the face of the rise of the robots. “In the meantime we’re still touring, still writing songs, still being nominated for Grammys,” Este says — which is true; I Quit is up for best rock album.
Now having just finished a nine-month tour, the sisters are back in civilian life in LA, “working out how to do the groceries and get the oil changed”, as Alana puts it. Is this the time when Haim will indeed quit, given the name of their album?
“There is no quitting in sight,” Alana says. “We’ve been off tour for three weeks. At first it’s nice to see your friends again, but now I’ve started crafting. Knitting, macrame … I’m getting into screen-printing. I think it’s a sign. It’s time to get back into the studio.” Still, they can for a moment bask in the success of Relationships, the song of 2025 that was seven years in the making.