On Haim’s ‘I Quit,’ a Breakup Is an Inspiration

Experience has a way of undermining certainties — especially ones about people. Simple hero-villain narratives develop gray areas, motives are reassessed. Blame gets reapportioned, ambivalences creep in.

On “I Quit,” Haim’s fourth album, the sisters Danielle, Alana and Este Haim apply the same generation-spanning pop expertise and ambition that they’ve previously brought to simpler scenarios. It’s a breakup album, but one that navigates all sorts of mixed emotions: recriminations and apologies, righteousness and doubts, longing and renunciation.

The songs on “I Quit” move through regrets and second-guessing to find relief, even liberation, in being single. “Now I’m gone, now I’m free / Born to run, nothing I need,” Danielle Haim sings in “Gone,” the album’s agenda-setting opening track. Lest anyone miss the point, the song samples the gospelly chorus of George Michaels’s “Freedom! ’90.”

Haim’s 2013 debut album, “Days Are Gone,” introduced a band with classic-rock skills and 21st-century resources. Singing quick-tongued, fine-tuned harmonies, Haim reconfigured decades of physical and computerized California sounds: Fleetwood Mac above all, with its vocal harmonies and panoply of guitar tones, but also Sheryl Crow, Michael Jackson, Tom Petty, Beck and more.

Haim used that vocabulary, much of it from before the sisters were born, to sing about matters of the heart with an implicit family solidarity. Their early videos often showed them striding together down Los Angeles streets.

Onstage, Haim performs straightforwardly in real time, with the sisters switching among instruments. Meanwhile, in the studio, Haim slips all sorts of clever details and sly electronic textures into natural-sounding tracks.