Alabama Shakes released "I Must Be Dreaming" on Friday, its first studio album in more than eleven years and the first the Grammy-winning band has made as a trio. The 11-track record, out on Island Records, follows 2015's "Sound & Color" and arrives after a reunion that began, almost by accident, at a craft brewery in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Singer and guitarist Brittany Howard was asked by Bo Hicks, co-founder of Druid City Brewing Company, to play a benefit show for the brewery and a local food pantry. Howard called guitarist Heath Fogg and bassist Zac Cockrell — the band's other two members since the exit of keyboardist and percussionist Ben Tanner and drummer Steve Johnson — to see about rehearsing a few old songs together. The trio's surprise performance in Tuscaloosa in December 2024 went well enough that they kept writing, and eventually found they had an album's worth of new material.
"So that's what we did, and it felt pretty nice," Howard told the Associated Press. "Then we were like, 'Well, should we do this again?'"
The album was produced by Shawn Everett, who also worked on "Sound & Color," and recorded at Sound Emporium and Blackbird Studio in Nashville. It was preceded by three singles released over the past year, "Another Life," "American Dream" and "I Feel Hope Coming," the last of which pairs Curtis Mayfield-inflected soul with lyrics about social unrest. Howard has singled out the track "Tea Time" as her favorite on the record, describing its mood as hypnotic and its imagery as almost medieval.
Howard, who has released two solo albums and won multiple Grammys during Alabama Shakes' hiatus, said the time apart changed how the band works together. "I've found that we've all grown up and we're much gentler, more sensitive people, which has been like a wonderful surprise," she said. She has also described approaching her lyrics differently this time, saying she found she "did have kind of surprising things to say."
Back on the Road
The band has booked a North American tour behind the album, with dates ranging from Tanglewood in Massachusetts to Radio City Music Hall in New York, plus festival stops including the Santa Barbara Bowl and Ohana Festival. It is the band's first extended tour since the "Sound & Color" cycle wound down in the mid-2010s, and will be the first extensive test of how the reunited trio's stripped-down lineup translates to arena and amphitheater stages built around the fuller band Alabama Shakes fans remember from a decade ago.
