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Music Review: Haim, Something to Tell You – festival headliners or bust

As exquisitely stylish as its predecessor, Haim’s second album Something to Tell You contains hooks big enough to land a whale.

Save for Pink at V and PJ Harvey at Green Man, there isn’t a single female artist or female-fronted group headlining a major UK festival this summer. It’s a grim imbalance that shouldn’t be accepted for a whole range of reasons, and certainly not so long as bands like Haim continue to keep coming strong.

Watch the disgustingly cool video for the LA sibling three-piece’s latest single Want You Back – the trio striding down a closed-set LA street at dawn, casually knocking out fly dance moves in a single continuous choreographed take – and just try and pretend like you wouldn’t want to be a Haim sister.

Written in their parents’ front room, Haim’s second album Something to Tell You arrives a patient and hard-touring three years after their successful 2014 debut Days Are Gone – an exquisitely stylish and tune-studded record with a foot planted firmly either side of the pop and rock divide.

Its successor does all of the same things right, insofar as being one of those records you can come at from a whole range of different directions and find something to love. Be it accessible reference points from 1970s Michael Jackson to Fleetwood Mac, Chaka Khan and TLC, glossy production that feels retro yet not anachronistic, and above all hooks big enough to land a whale.

Want You Back makes light work of swaggeringly sharing a title with one of the greatest pop songs of all time.

With its popping bassline and regret-tinged lyrics – multi-instrumentalists and co-vocalists Este, Danielle and Alana tossing the lead line and harmonies back and forth between them like a medicine ball – Want You Back makes light work of swaggeringly sharing a title with one of the greatest pop songs of all time.

Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty

It’s one of several key collaborations with Ariel Rechtshaid, a finger-on-the-pulse writer-producer behind hits by Adele and Carly Rae Jepsen among many others, who helps bring a certain intangible freshness even to a straight Motown-y pastiche like Little Of Your Love (eat your heart out Mark Ronson).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99NAUw51fP8

You Never Knew is like an extra-dreamified reimagining of Tango in the Night era Mac. Right Now, with its feedback squalls and a beat that never quite drops, is one of those songs that fascinatingly seems to defy the conventional algebra of pop in the way that many of Beyoncé’s best recent offerings do. If Haim don’t smash the glass ceiling to major festival headlining soon, it’ll be through no fault of their own.

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