Haim‘s tour finale Saturday night at the Santa Barbara Bowl was full of reassurances. First of all, it was good to see for certain that Alana Haim’s head looks just fine, and completely intact, after, well, you know. Secondly, the band is sounding better than fine. The only squib marks left on anyone were on the almost 5,000 patrons who braved one of the most refreshingly moderate ocean breezes California has to offer to see maybe still the best homegrown group California has had to offer in any recent year. To paraphrase their frequent partner in crime, Paul Thomas Anderson: One banger after another! Seriously.
If there’s anything to add on the subject of reassurances that doesn’t have anything to do with head wounds, it would be how the band’s fourth and most recent album, “I Quit,” would translate live. If you were overthinking that sort of thing and trying to forecast it, you could be of two minds about how it might go. On the one hand, “I Quit” represents a new step for the sister trio in sounding as much like an actual rock band on record as they do in concert, with more guitars and less reliance on the electronics or loops of past albums. A recipe for further rocking out, as if Haim ever needed one before? It would have seem to have augured that way.
On the other hand, “I Quit” is an album that was given that title for a reason, and not just because it sounds a little funny. It’s largely about reckonings that feel like pathways to uncertain exits, so the tone is pretty contemplative. (Although they made sure to throw in a few danceable and/or lewd numbers to leaven things.) Simply put, in a year with a bunch of pretty solid divorce albums, this feels like it was that for principal singer-songwriter Danielle Haim. Never mind that she wasn’t actually married; the stakes of the songs, and the seriousness with which they address getting out of something long-term, are on that level. So maybe, just maybe, you could imagine a live set built around that new material feeling a little weightier than what we’re used to from the sisters.
It did not. Haim managed to put on a show that felt about 95% mirthful while still honoring the integrity of the new songs that dig emotionally deeper. We will probably not live to see the day when Haim is putting on anything other than a happy-go-gleeful concert, as long as the act still includes sister-on-the-left Alana acting as the designated cheerleader, and sister-on-the-right Este being expressive enough for an entire extended family. At the quieter center of that slight mayhem is the slightly more reserved Danielle, who “doesn’t talk,” as Alana amusingly declared at one point in some lopsided banter. Danielle is not really quite the Teller of the group — she does use her words — but you get the sense she would rather not be doing song intros that might require her to explain what her songs are about when she could just be singing them. And expounding on them with some nice face-ripping-off guitar leads. It’s all very comical in a way that still leaves room for real chops and actual emotional catharsis.
Major props are due to the tour’s clever production design, which has been conceived in a way that sometimes is played for broad laughs and sometimes more subtly sets up the themes of the material without the band members having to talk so much. It involved multiple screens, starting with a Times Square-style ticker going across the top of the stage that involved old-school red-block-letter messages scrolling from right to left. By the middle of the show, the ticker had developed its own personality and was engaging in conversation with the sisters as “the oracle,” offering Magic 8 Ball-style answers to questions about, like, whether they were going to party in Goleta later on.
But in the first and last portions of the show, the screen mostly flashed “I quit” messages that related to the songs about to be performed, or to a plethora of positive meanings that could be drawn out of such a negative-sounding phrase. Like: “I quit apologizing.” “I quit regret.” “I quit bad kissers.” “I quit envy.” “I quit saying I’m okay.” “I quit your shit.” “I quit lying to yourself.” And, on the wittier side, “I quit clothing,” right before Danielle sang “All Over Me,” an outlier on the new album that may count as the band’s lustiest song, which, in their sexually untimid catalog, is saying something. Also: “I quit winter,” which any fan would have known was a LOL segue into “Summer Girl,” their most feel-good song (which is also saying something).
Danielle Haim and Este Haim of Haim perform on the Park stage during day four of Glastonbury festival 2025.
Redferns
There were other nice touches involving the screens. Like a digital intermission clock of sorts that kept the audience abreast of what percentage of the time between sets had been used up. (The way it suddenly started racing to 100% right before the band came on suggested that the clock may not be fully Seiko-accurate, but it’s the funny idea that counts.) The screens were also used for some more pleasingly abstract purposes, like opening up a central window at the start of the first song to show Danielle singing and strumming in isolation, and then opening similar digital windows on either side for Alana and Este. A larger overhead screen allowed for black-and-white widescreen closeups, and also crowd shots of some of the ladies in the front of the pit exchanging mutually supportive middle fingers with the women on stage, as was appropriate to the song at the time.
As is customary, Danielle got the showier instrumental bits of the night, going from playing some serious fuzz guitar to the mid-show segment that has her kicking it on drums. (The trio has two supplementary players, identified as Nick and Ryan, who bolster and fill in on multiple instruments as needed.) Of the three of them, Este is the one most anchored to a single instrument, her thick-and-thicker bass, but even she set that down at the end of “In It” to join the inevitable number in any Haim concert where all three are pounding simultaneously on kettle drums. (It was their only synchronized move; this tour, they’ve dropped the choreographed dance moment they used to incorporate.) The sense that all three of them can and will trade up instruments is part of the fun: As they cheekily and definatly declared an album ago, they are women in music. For real.
Este got a solo lead vocal number in the soul-emo mode with the latest album’s “Cry,” followed by Alana getting a whole number to herself — the first time that’s happened on a tour, she noted — with the disco-y “Spinning.” (Getting the older crowd in the fixed upper seats in Santa Barbara to do audience-participation moves was tough, but the young people on the floor were into following wherever Alana wanted to lead.) But it’s hardly as if we’d never hear Alana’s voice without that new spotlight slot for her. Haim has a few numbers in the show where they each trade lead vocals, like their acoustic sisterhood anthem “Hallelujah,” and the new, country-flavored “Blood on the Street.” Even fashioned as a group-sing, that latter number allowed Danielle one of her most expressive moments of the night. Following a quirkily bluesy guitar solo, when she got to her closing verse, she started riffing on the song’s lyrics, in mock-anger. “I was UNFAIR?… ME?” Having her set her usual cool aside and act out a little bit of the songs’ latent psychodrama for a few moments was a kick.
For all the fun and games at a Haim show, it’s good to have those few moments that reinforce that, especially on record, they’re not always kidding around. I appreciated the way the show was bookended with some of the tentative and yet tough-minded breakup songs from the latest album, even though the usual touring rule would be to begin and end with the greatest hits. As an opener, “Gone” was rabble-rouser enough, with its power cords and slow-burning eff-you attitude (and George Michael “Freedom” interpolation). Mid-show, Danielle used the acoustic segment to bring out a song the band doesn’t do every night, “The Farm,” which might be the best song off the latest album, if also the quietest and most relationship-weary.
And it was surprising to see them close out the encore with “Down to Be Wrong,” a kind of mid-tempo slammer that comes smack in the middle of the latest album. When you heard it land there, it made sense: There’s something deeply and surprisingly anthemic about hearing Danielle, over some heavy electric strumming, singing the simple words: “Down to be wrong / Don’t need to be right.” Not needing to be correct at all times, when some kind of action needs to be taken — that might really count as some hard-earned, feisty wisdom to send a crowd home mulling as their parting earworm.
The name of this road show was, of course, the “I Quit Tour,” so maybe it had nothing to do with it being the end of the tour that, at the very end of the night, that ticker behind the stage brightly declared: “HAIM QUITS.” A good little gag, in a night that had a lot of them. But it underscored just how much they spent the final night of their outing sounding the very opposite of resigned.
Haim setlist at the Santa Barbara Bowl, Oct. 11, 2025:
Gone
All Over Me
Take Me Back
My Song 5
Cry Spinning
Don’t Wanna
Million Years
The Steps
Gasoline
Blood on the Street
The Farm
Hallelujah
Summer Girl
Want You Back
Relationships
Now I’m In It
(encore)
The Wire
Down to Be Wrong
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