Alabama Shakes Return With ‘I Must Be Dreaming,’ Their First Album in More Than a Decade

Alabama Shakes are returning with their third album, I Must Be Dreaming, their first full-length in more than a decade. The record arrives fifteen years after the band’s debut EP turned them into an unlikely symbol of lo-fi vintage rock. Since then, Brittany Howard has spent much of her time pushing against that early image, first with 2015’s Sound + Color and later through a solo catalog that refused easy genre placement.

The new album reconnects Howard with bassist Zack Cockrell and guitarist Heath Fogg as a three-piece. Across its songs, the band moves between styles without abandoning the tension of their early material. “Garden” reaches back toward pre-war American songwriting, while “Tea Time” leans into the Afrofuturistic territory Howard explored on her own. “Another Life” builds a chamber-soul arrangement around congas, glockenspiel, and a mostly one-note guitar solo.

Collaborators remain central. Longtime keyboardist Ben Tanner anchors “Waist Deep” with electric piano, while “American Dream” uses Cockrell’s front-mixed melodic bass and Fogg’s guitar to convey political unease more directly than the lyrics do. Among the album’s centerpieces is “I Feel Hope Coming,” a track that pulls from Curtis Mayfield-era soul and other directions.

The result is a record less concerned with recapturing the past than with showing what this band can sound like now.