The band Stevie Nicks said would be “a huge force in rock and roll”
Predicting the next big thing in rock is nearly impossible. No matter how confident someone is in identifying the next Kurt Cobain, The Beatles, or Bob Dylan, they risk looking out of touch if their predictions miss the mark. While Stevie Nicks never claimed to be a musical Nostradamus, she did feel that listening to Haim evoked serious flashbacks to the glory days of rock and roll.
But Nicks was never someone who strictly listened to music for the raw sound of every single note. If it was produced immaculately, that was certainly a bonus, but it was more about the emotion and the energy that a group created whenever they strapped on their instruments that made them stand out.
That’s what prompted some of the problems between her and Lindsey Buckingham back in the day. Sure, Fleetwood Mac had one of the greatest productions to their name with Rumours, but having a great-sounding record didn’t mean anything if it didn’t have anything to say underneath it all.
But Haim has always been a bit of a different beast. Outside of having some of the greatest voices in indie music, their songs always spoke to something deeper than just a standard love song. This was about dissecting the inner workings of relationships, and that was the kind of music that spoke straight to Nicks’ heart.
When talking about the modern age of musicians, Nicks put Haim at the top of her list of people to look out for, saying, “They came to my house to do a photo session for T Magazine, so I came down the stairs, with my IPod player, playing ‘Go Slow.’ I came down the stairs with that just blasting. That was our first connection. Right now, I am listening to Haim, whom I think are going to be a huge force in rock n’ roll.”
There are even a few callbacks to that classic era of rock and roll. It’s one thing to hear a story about someone who had their heart cut out, but when every one of them starts harmonising with each other, it’s like the listener is transported to the world where the California rock scene never got past 1977, where everything was about singer-songwriters and the Eagles were still known as the greatest group in the world.
And it’s not like Haim hasn’t capitalised on that, either. While they haven’t released any proper studio albums since Women in Music Vol. III back in 2020, what they’ve already created is still a treasure trove that anyone can get lost in, down to the rustic acoustic songs or the few instances when they’re taking on a more contemporary sound.
Haim isn’t exactly rock in the same way that other artists define themselves, but even Nicks never tried to tie herself to strictly one genre of music. As far as they were concerned, it was all just good music if it had emotion behind it, and if you could feel it in your soul as you sang it, it didn’t take that much effort for the audience to go along with it, too.
