Like Lady Gaga, it’s been five years since the last time that HAIM released a right proper studio album (called Women in Music Pt. III). And so, perhaps finally feeling the push of time, the Haim sisters—Danielle, Este and Alana—have at last seen fit to give their fans a taste of what’s to come on their fourth album (which is being described as “like Sex and the City—except in Los Angeles”). Enter the first single from it: “Relationships.” A word that’s quite loaded, particularly when directed at women. More to the point, hetero women with increasingly diminished patience for the fuckery of the so-called hetero man. To boot, the fact that the word, for most people, automatically bears a romantic connotation (whereas, if it’s a friend you’re talking about, you refer to it as a “friendship”) is another aspect of the title that makes it very deliberate on HAIM’s part.
Directed by Camille Summers-Valli, the video opens with a noticeably tilted shot from the inside of the back of a car that’s being loaded up with boxes by the Haim sisters. And it’s Danielle who looks, in all honesty, the most distraught about the whole thing as the opening lyrics commence: “Wasting time driving through the Eastside/Doing my thing cause I can’t decide if we’re through/Well are we?/And if we are/What we gonna do?” Summers-Valli then cuts to another perspective from inside the car, showing us, instead, the backseat where the love interest of, apparently, just Danielle is staring at the boxes that keep piling up. Of course, it makes sense that Danielle is the one to get to be the “star” of this breakup narrative. Not just because she’s the lead singer, but because she herself went through a momentous breakup recently, calling it quits—after almost a decade—with Ariel Rechtshaid, their long-time producer (as well as a producer for many others). Which meant, for the first time, the Haim sisters were making an album without him. Sad on the one hand, yes, but totally liberating on the other.
As for Ariel’s “stand-in” in the video, he’s played by Drew Starkey (who some might recognize most recently from Luca Guadagnino’s Queer)—so we’ll call him Drew (not Ariel). And the overall vibe he gives off throughout is: why, God, why? Which is the same feeling HAIM gets across in their lyrics. The idea that relationships are a simultaneous blessing and curse. Though mainly the latter. And with such a theme in mind, it’s no wonder that the sound of the song bears a certain resemblance to both Carly Rae Jepsen (mainly in the chirpy vocals) and The xx (mainly in the lamentation over love lost).
Then again, relationship dissection is pretty much every musician’s bread and butter (*cough cough* Taylor Swift). So it is that, as the lyrical tale unfolds, Haim continues with, “Relationships/What’s all this talk about relationships?/It feels like everyone’s caught up in it/Oh just you wait you must be new to this.” Because to not understand the nature of obsession and frustration in matters of relationships must automatically mean one is new to “that whole scene.”
After the initial shot of the trio packing up the car, everyone then starts moving backwards before an analogue clock on the wall confirms what the Haim sisters want to get across: “If I could turn back time/If I could find a way/I’d take back those words that have hurt you/And you’d stay.” Cher’s words, sure, but the sentiment is evident here as well, with Danielle garnering the bulk of “relationship time” with Drew—mainly by way of lying next to him on the floor in her zebra-print bra.
In between, she’s in the bedroom with her sisters looking as woeful and resigned as they do. This played up by the lyrics, “Fucking relationships/Don’t they end up all the same/When there’s no one left to blame?/I think I’m in love but I can’t stand/Fucking relationships.” This appears to be an increasingly common sentiment, not just among hetero women who have lost all hope vis-à-vis the prospect of a monogamous relationship that lasts “forever,” but also in terms of explaining the potential “why” for the rise of polyamory. Or, to use another phrase to describe it, an overarching sense of not wanting/feeling obliged to be committed to any one person.
And why would anyone want to be based on how Haim describes “fuckin’ relationships,” further adding, “How did we get ourselves into this?/Oh this can’t just be the way it is/Or is it just the shit our parents did/And had to live with it/In their relationship?” and “Let me tell you how it ends/When we can’t even pretend/Feels like we’re not even friends/In this relationship.” Because, yes, for most people (who aren’t European), remaining friends with someone as the romantic aspect of the relationship starts to curdle is an all but impossible task.
As the clock keeps rewinding on the relationship between Danielle and Drew, the viewer is finally taken out of the domestic setting altogether and back into the club, where the two are dancing in such a way as to indicate the still-newness of their rapport (in fact, it seems as though this is the night they first met), rubbing and grinding against each other in between occasional impassioned besos. It is after this scene that time appears to collapse in on itself, so to speak, with various other scenes from different “eras” of the relationship (including when the pair first moved in together) being intercut willy-nilly. To be sure, this is a deliberate tactic on Haim and Summers-Valli’s part, designed almost as though to highlight that, at the end of a relationship, it is this “barrage of memories” effect that one has as they contemplate the “how” of the demise. A demise that, despite all the warning signs, they never fully saw coming.
And then, for women especially, one is left with the soul-shattering revelation, “I’ve always been averse to conflict/But you really fucked with my confidence.” This followed by the too-late query, “You gotta tell me the truth if you don’t want to try/I hear a voice in my head and it keeps asking/Why am I in this relationship?” For many, the answer is pure and simple: to stave off loneliness at any cost. Even the cost of one’s, as mentioned above, self-confidence. Not to mention the additional realization that the only thing worse than feeling lonely is feeling lonely in a relationship.
Ending on the same scene that the video started with—packing up the car with all of his boxes—it’s Alana who gives an “oh well” type of look as she closes the trunk. As though to say, “It might be painful now, but it’s to be expected when you take the risk on any fuckin’ relationship.” To that end, as though realizing that they might be contributing to the total destruction of the capitalist machine (which is very much contingent upon monogamous relationships), the Haim sisters decide to tack on the verse, “But I would do it all again/If you put down your defenses/I think I’m in love so why am I trying to/Escape from it?” Maybe because, for some, the heart can only endure so much before it explodes.
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