Haim steps into a new groove on new album

Haim makes music of forward momentum, soundtracks for strutting confidently away from trouble. Its most memorable videos feature the trio's members — the sisters Alana, Danielle and Este Haim — marching in loose lockstep with one another, occasionally bursting into playful choreography. It's a visual trope that lets them have some revisionist fun with girl group iconography, but it's also a natural extension of their percussive sound. "We like rhythm," Danielle said in a 2013 interview. "It's all these parts interlocking."

But something's up in "I Know Alone," a moody single from the band's third album, "Women in Music Pt. III" (Columbia): Haim is frozen in place. The song's tempo, too, is skittish and unpredictable; voices and synthesizers drip into each other like bleeding water colors. "I Know Alone" was recorded before the lonesome days of social distancing, but its video is an artifact of our months of inertia ("directed remotely by Jake Schreier"): The three sisters stand roughly 6 feet apart in matching jeans and move, zombielike, through a surreal, stationary dance routine.

"Been a couple days since I've been out," Danielle sings in her low croon, "Calling all my friends but they won't pick up." The song is a duet between slow-motion depression and frantic spurts of anxiety — emotionally, Haim has never sounded so stuck. But "I Know Alone," like much of the freewheeling new record, clears a welcome path forward for the group's sound. Before the sisters started Haim, they were in Rockinhaim, a multigenerational family band that performed a deep repertoire of classic rock covers and gigged around their home in the San Fernando Valley. They broke off and started writing their own songs in 2007, but their early accomplished-yet-breezy pop-rock singles like "Falling" and "The Wire" felt coated in a sheen...