Everyone is invited to be the fourth Haim sister

"When are you interviewing Haim?" my sister Emily texts, late one night. "I wanted you to ask if I can be their fourth member."

There's just one problem: I also want to be Haim's fourth member. And we're not alone. Taylor Swift and actress Brie Larson have also begged for the position.

Fellow Oscar-winner Emma Stone even teamed up with them for a Spice Girls tribute although, sadly, that wasn't a permanent deal.

There's clearly something going on.

Sisters Este, Danielle and Alana began their career playing gigs at local delicatessens with their parents. Now they're multiple Grammy nominees.

Like all the best bands, they're a tight-knit gang. Their videos often show them striding in unison down the streets of Los Angeles. On stage, they play with such unfettered joy you can't help but think, "I want to be part of that, too."

"The amount of times on tour that young girls came up to us and said, 'After your show, I got a guitar, I picked up drum sticks, I picked up a bass'," says Alana, the youngest of the Haim siblings. "That's the biggest honour. That's an award in itself. We've done our job if we can inspire young girls to start a band.

"So everyone is invited to be the fourth Haim sister."

(Emily, you're in!)

The band have called into the BBC from home, where they're resting up after an extensive tour in support of their fourth album, I Quit.

They're currently reeling from the news it's been nominated for best rock album at the Grammys - with Haim the first all-female band ever in contention for the prize.

"I watch the nominations every year, so it kind of feels like The Truman Show when your name is read out," says Alana. "I had to call my sisters to say, 'Did I hear this right or am I hallucinating?'"

The significance of the nomination isn't lost on the trio.

"We really set out to make a rock album this time, so it's a huge milestone," says Alana. "But we're just grateful for the women that came before us.

"All we looked up to were women rock artists," adds Este. "That was our world, growing up, whether it be Stevie Nicks, or Joni Mitchell, or Pat Benatar."

Heartbreak and humour

The record emerged from a period of emotional upheaval. All three sisters found themselves single, and the music inhabits that strange liminal space where you're relieved to be free, but not quite ready to move on.

"Can I have your attention, please, for the last time before I leave," sings Danielle, over an Americana-style acoustic guitar on the opening track, Gone.

Then: "On second thought, I changed my mind."

Este takes over the vocals on Cry, tracking her progress through the seven stages of grief. "I'm past the anger, past the rage / But the hurt ain't gone."

There are a lot of departures, a lot of goodbyes. The sisters want love, but not the specific love they've got. You can hear them working out in real time who they want to be, and refusing to be defined by how others see them.

"I love that description, yes," says Danielle. "I Quit is kind of like a mantra. You have to actively work on shutting out the noise and saying, 'I don't give an [expletive] what people think'.

"When we were in our 20s, I wasn't strong enough to say something like that," says Alana, picking up the theme.

"I was more like, 'Oh, please love me'.

"But by the time we get to I Quit, I'm like, 'Screw this, I'm done'. And with that comes an inner strength that I'm very proud to have."

That toughness required a new sound - more raw and immediate than anything the band had done before.

For Danielle, who co-produced the album with Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of Vampire Weekend, that started with the drums.

She plays an acoustic kit on every track, often layering multiple takes, recorded in different studios to capture specific tones. On Everybody's Trying To Figure Me Out, she even tuned her snare drum to match the "iconic" thwack of U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday.

"Drums are such a nuanced like thing, and I care so much about it, so much," she says, as if that wasn't abundantly clear already.

"'Journey of the drum sound' will be the name of our memoir," laughs Alana.

"I've said it a million times, our albums don't start until we find the perfect drum sound, and then we can continue on the journey of writing the songs."

The evolution of Haim's sound also helped them grasp songs that had slipped through their fingers over the last decade.

I Quit's first single Relationships is a glossy pop earworm that first came to Danielle on a flight home from Haim's 2017 Australian tour.

In the intervening years, it went through "hundreds" of re-writes, changing lyrics and tempos, before finally "coming to life" at Batmanglij's home studio.

By contrast, Take Me Back was made up on the spot, as the band shared raucous stories from their high school days - of boys who couldn't perform in bed and friends who lost control of their bowels "in the back of a truck".

"That one fell into place so quickly," says Alana. "We didn't even know if it was going to go on the album.

"It was just us riffing from the heart and being like, 'This is the kind of song that we want to make today', with no pressure. We were laughing through the whole experience.

"At the end of it, we were like, 'This is hilarious, we've got to put it on the album'."

That candour inspired the album's promotional campaign, where the sisters shared some of their dating horror stories.

One man broke up with Este when she told him their future children might have Type 1 Diabetes. He was like, 'Then why are we here?'" she recalls.

Alana shared the story of travelling to London to spend New Year's Eve with a musician she thought she was dating, only for him to high five her at midnight.

On tour, fans shared their own disaster stories on Haim's video screens.

Among them was a girl in Philadelphia who discovered her boyfriend's private safe contained neither money nor passports, but a shrine to his ex... And his mum.

"When you're going through these heartbreaks, you just feel like there's no light," says Alana.

'So to be able to laugh at those stories and share them with other people, and then have them tell you even crazier stories, it's so amazing.

"We can laugh at all these things, and it's not going to keep us from trying to find love in the future."

It's not difficult to sense a shift in the band. The first time we met in 2012, they were still wet behind the ears, and giddy from making their debut at London's O2 Arena.

As the support act for Florence + The Machine, the sisters were overwhelmed at the realisation they'd just played the same stage as The Rolling Stones.

"I've been crawling on the floor, trying to soak it all up," said Alana. "I think I have a little Mick Jagger in me."

These days, Haim are more confident of their place in the rock pantheon.

They're festival headliners, with two number one albums and an international fan base.

Not only that, but they have successful side hustles in acting (Alana has just been "shot in the head by Sean Penn" in One Battle After Another) and soundtrack work (Este's credits include The White Lotus and Loot).

But Haim will always be their number one priority.

"Me and my siblings have been playing music since I was four years old," says Alana.

"It's like there's nothing else that we were supposed to do. And I'm really grateful we've gotten here and we're still kicking."