Pochette officielle — Alabama Shakes / Island Records
Eleven years. That is how long fans waited for Alabama Shakes to follow up Sound and Color, the 2015 record that made Brittany Howard’s band one of the most respected names in American soul-rock. I Must Be Dreaming, out August 28, 2026 on Island Records, is more than a comeback: it is proof that one of the great live outfits of the 2010s still had something to say.
The return of a band many thought was over
For a while, we had almost stopped believing. After Sound and Color and a triumphant tour, Alabama Shakes went quiet. Brittany Howard built an acclaimed solo career, notably with Jaime in 2019, exploring more intimate and free-flowing music. The band itself seemed like a closed chapter. So the arrival of a third album, cut as a trio, comes as a surprise: Brittany Howard on vocals and guitar, Heath Fogg on guitar and Zac Cockrell on bass. The historic core has tightened, and that leaner setup can be heard in music that is less tense and more spacious than before.
Produced by Shawn Everett, Howard’s longtime collaborator, and by the band, I Must Be Dreaming was recorded in Nashville, between Sound Emporium and Blackbird Studio. The house signature is all there: takes that let the players breathe, an analog warmth and, above all, that voice, able to move from a whisper to a gospel roar within a single bar.
To grasp the weight of this return, remember where the band came from. Formed in Athens, a small town in Alabama, the Shakes broke out in 2012 with Boys and Girls and the hit Hold On, revealing the extraordinary voice of a twenty-year-old singer. Three years later, Sound and Color sealed it all: number one in the United States, several Grammy Awards, unanimous critical praise. They stood as one of the rare acts to make Southern rock, soul and blues speak to modern production. That is the heavy legacy the trio had to face on its way back.
A psychedelic, political record
The tone, though, has shifted. Where Sound and Color played the futuristic-soul card, this album sinks into a cottony psychedelia of slowed grooves and dreamy textures. The title captures the project’s ambiguity: I Must Be Dreaming. Howard has explained the phrase’s double meaning, poised between dread at a world gone mad and wonder at its stubborn beauty. Several tracks look America’s political climate in the eye, with a running thread of unease and dissociation, and never slip into pamphlet.
That may be the record’s real strength: it turns the anxiety of an era into caressing, almost soothing music. It is a risky bet, and critics largely praised it while noting, here and there, a more restrained streak, less electric than the earliest Shakes. Call it caution; you could also hear it as the calm of a band with nothing left to prove. The specialist press underlined that balance: a record that finally gives room to exceptional musicians, even at the cost of some of the rage that once made the Shakes leap. The grit remains; the tension has melted.
There is also a real sense of craft in how the album is sequenced. It opens softly, drifts through its most dissociated passages in the middle, then gathers itself toward a fragile hope by the end. Nothing is rushed, and the record rewards patience: the more you sit with it, the more its slow-burning arrangements and buried hooks reveal themselves. This is an album built for repeated listening rather than instant impact.
Three tracks to enter the album
Another Life was the first signal, the band’s first new song in a decade. Carried by Howard’s voice, it sets the album’s climate at once: a slow, haunted soul that takes its time to unfold. It is the ideal way in for anyone wanting to know where the band stands today.
American Dream is the record’s political heart. A manifesto-song released in spring 2026, it lists off virtues while a choir alternates between the American dream and the impossible dream. The contrast between the melody’s sweetness and the bitterness of the words is what makes the track land, one of the album’s most striking.
I Feel Hope Coming, finally, brings the light. Howard has said she drew on younger generations and their refusal of division, framing hope as a choice rather than naivety. Her vocal, moving from fragility to catharsis, sums up what the band does best: turning a simple emotion into a moment of grace.
The takeaway
I Must Be Dreaming may not be Alabama Shakes’ most fiery record, but it is surely their most inhabited. Eleven tracks, among them Tea Time, Garden, Waist Deep and Tied To You, that form a coherent whole, best heard in one sitting, ideally on headphones. It is a return that does not try to replay the past: it extends a trajectory, that of a band which, from the raw soul of its debut to today’s waking dream, has never stopped looking for light in the chaos.
Anyone drawn to this rich, carnal, demanding soul will find kindred sensations on the joint project by Erykah Badu and The Alchemist, or in Prince’s posthumous vault-opener Timeless. Records that, like this one, remind us that soul is a matter of spirit before it is a matter of style.
