Haim: the soft-rock sisters on working hard to sound effortless

Este, Danielle and Alana Haim, the Californian sisters who form perhaps the most adored trio in music right now, make it easy to assume these three minds operate as one. While listening to questions, they are three symmetrical and genetically simpatico faces, attention trained patiently. While answering those questions, they’re a ragged, energising symphony of sentence-finishing, speaking in chorus, and lapsing into song. There’s a distinct, eerie charm to their melded consciousness.

As a band, that charm fires up songs that sound, as one friend put it, as though Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie had killed off all the dudes in Fleetwood Mac and were now cheerily making records about pretending to miss them. Haim (which is their surname, pronounced “high-im” and, aptly enough, Hebrew for “life”) write the kind of pop-rock that feels like an orange ice-lolly on the first hot day of the year. Crushing on them – their hooks, their personalities, their literal and manifest sisterhood – seems like the requisite way to experience them.

They also drum and shred and sing so well that 25-year-old Alana, the youngest, has developed a loathing for the word “actually”: as she explains, there have been just too many guys backstage who’ve told them, post-show, that they “actually” play their many instruments really well. “I mean, even to this day,” she says, voice thick with exasperation, “people are, like: ‘Who writes your songs?’”

We meet at the very un-rock star hour of 9am, a week before the release of their second album, Something to Tell You. Alana, in jeans and a loose-fitting, well-worn Los Angeles Raiders T-shirt, is like a kid before Christmas: “Seven days, guys! Seven days. Seven days! Aggghh!” The setting is an immaculate hotel suite in a fancy new hotel on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Hastily, they explain that the room isn’t theirs. “If we were staying here,” says Alana, taking the wide, elbows-to-knees repose we’d call manspreading if she were a guy, “there would be clothes …” And 31-year-old Este, their bassist, finishes the sentence: “… everywhere. It would be pure chaos.”

Blond, six feet tall and with a face like a sardonic Botticelli, Este once earned her generation’s approbation for tweeting that she wanted to “chisel Andrew Garfield’s dick with my labia”. Her “bass faces” – the uninhibited gurnings of a musician feeling it with all her heart and soul – are immortalised in online slideshows. She’s a bawdy foil to 28-year-old frontwoman Danielle, whom she and Alana – forever the little sister – seem to protectively bookend. On stage, Danielle is hard-edged with a rock star élan redolent of Chrissie Hynde and PJ Harvey. Today, though, sheltering in an oversize oatmeal-coloured jumper, there is a faraway, slightly wonderstruck quality to her; softly-spoken and apologetic..

There can be a special kind of obnoxiousness to people who have had their every dream come true. Haim however, who have now opened for most of their favourite bands (Primal Scream, Vampire Weekend, Florence and the Machine), toured with Taylor Swift, been Grammy-nominated and earned love from Jay-Z, Katy Perry and hundreds of thousands of fans, are women for whom success seems to enhance their appeal. They are daughters who love their parents, and musicians who treat their immeasurable good fortune with a kind of dorky awe. Este, for example, still can’t get her head around playing to enthusiastic crowds. “You’re looking out like: ‘Oh my God, you know the words to this song?’ It’s so weird. I wrote these songs in my living room in the Valley with my mom making nachos for us! Do you know what I mean?”

That living room she mentions has taken its place in pop lore. It’s where they wrote 2013’s Days Are Gone, a first album they spent almost six years finessing, and a record that debuted at No 1 in the UK album chart. It’s also where they returned, after an epic touring schedule, to set about making their second. “We just kind of chipped away every day,” says Este, “for two-and-a-half years.” Danielle explains: “It’s not like every morning I just take a shower and I’m like, ‘Oh, I have this great idea for a song.’ We have to work at it. You have to show up every day.” That bit-by-bit effort has yielded songs that sound as effortless and indelible as their first record’s, albeit more fussily produced this time round. They enlisted wunderkind Ariel Rechtshaid as well as former Vampire Weekend man Rostam Batmanglij and British indie-R&B writer-producer Dev Hynes to be in service to their sound.

Haim began as a family band under the guileless name of Rockinhaim, playing local gigs with their dad, Mordechai (“Moti”), a former professional footballer, and their mother, Donna, who met in New York. “I feel like my parents lived a crazier, funner life than I did,” says Alana. “All they did was dance and play music. I was, like: ‘This is the most beautiful love story I’ve ever heard! You guys just met, and fell in love, and danced all the time?’” Este picks up the thread – “I wish I could get in a time machine” – and all three speak rapturously of the 70s New York of CBGB, Studio 54 and Max’s Kansas City. “Back then you’d actually have a dance partner to go clubbing with,” says Este.

Forlorn but a little self-mocking, Danielle adds: “It’s hard to find a guy to dance with! I feel like I haven’t found my dance partner.”

“There’s a song right there,” Este pronounces, with big-sisterly authority.

“Record three,” Alana suggests, “I Haven’t Found My Dance Partner.”

Casting Danielle a look, Este adds, in warning: “Your dance card is gonna be pretty full, though, if you put that out there.”

At Glastonbury this year they did just fine without partners; at various points, each sister abandoned her instrument to dance. Alana jumped off stage and bounced down to the crowd . They’ve danced in videos, too, first for If I Could Change Your Mind, whose choreography is a winning combination of kitschiness and sincerity. Their synchronised moves read like a living room homage to Destiny’s Child. Like them, Haim, who have been courted by high fashion, are not above a co-ordinated red-carpet look.

Their latest video is choreographed, too. For the pounding Want You Back they groove down a deserted Ventura Boulevard at dawn, the same San Fernando Valley street that Tom Petty crooned over in 1989’s Free Fallin’. It’s not so easy to shut down an LA thoroughfare but, as Este says: “The Valley gods were shining on us.” They like to think there was someone in City Hall, who, as Alana puts it, “went, ‘Oh, the Haim girls? Yeah’”.

It wasn’t always thus, of course. “We know exactly how it feels to be booed,” says Alana. “We know exactly how it feels to get shit thrown at you. You have to go through that shit. That’s the thing: to me, that was fun as fuck that I get to tell those stories because we worked so hard for five years. It was so funny when we came up to the UK and it was like, ‘Overnight sensation!’ I’m like: ‘Overnight sensation after five years!’” They’ve played venues, they say, where there were only men’s toilets backstage: “We had to figure out how to pee in a urinal,” says Alana.

“We’re really good at it by the way,” Este says dryly. “I could literally show you,” and she yanks a leg in the air. “Honestly, we’re limber as fuck now.”

A summer of touring lies ahead and, “if we seem excited,” says Danielle, with a direct, earnest look, “it’s just because we’re truly just very excited to go back on tour. We don’t take any of this very lightly. We spent the last two-and-a-half years working on these songs every day to make sure that we’re giving everyone the best thing that we can do. We take it so seriously.” Their music yes, but themselves, thankfully, no.