The comeback album is fraught with pitfalls. Too often, a band returns from a long hiatus with something overcooked, bearing all the scars of its protracted birth. Alabama Shakes have sidestepped that trap entirely. I Must Be Dreaming, their first album in over a decade, arrives not as a strained reunion but as a natural next breath, dreamy and defiant in equal measure.
A Brewery, A Reunion
The story of how this record came to be is almost too perfect. Brittany Howard, fresh off her 2024 solo record What Now, got a call from Bo Hicks, co-founder of Druid City Brewing in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Could she play a benefit? She rang old bandmates Heath Fogg and Zac Cockrell to rehearse. "That felt pretty nice," Howard said. "Should we do this again?" The snowball rolled. A surprise gig in Tuscaloosa, late 2024. A tour. Then, unexpectedly, an album nobody planned to make.
Produced with Shawn Everett at Sound Emporium and Blackbird Studio in Nashville, the 11-track record is the first without original drummer Steve Johnson. What remains is a trio who sound revitalised, not diminished. The leaner lineup sharpens the focus.
Protest and Pillow Talk
The title holds a double meaning. I Must Be Dreaming captures both the surreality of the American present and the sheer disbelief of domestic happiness. Howard, now engaged, fills Easy with delighted wonder at a love that feels almost too secure to be real. But the same voice that coos through bedroom soul also snarls through I Feel Hope Coming, a Curtis Mayfield-inflected protest song that opens with the line "I don't want your martial law, I want clean air." It is a record of contradictions, and that tension is its engine.
The sound has shifted. Where Boys & Girls traded on Southern grit and Sound & Color pushed into psychedelia, this record dissolves into gauzy soul. Another Life glimmers with falsetto and regret. Garden is a sultry blues whisper, Philly smooth rather than Memphis tough. How Love's Supposed to Go is the funk celebration, guitar solo and all.
Eleven Years, Still Shaking
The political tracks hit hardest. American Dream is a slow burn through national sins, paltry wages and plentiful guns, Howard repeating "Keep dreaming" over skeletal drums and acid guitar. NME called it protest music without the bite. MOJO gave it four stars and said they came back fighting. Both are right. The understated production means the fury simmers rather than explodes, but the words land regardless.
What makes I Must Be Dreaming essential is its refusal to choose a side. Howard is not just the protest singer or the lover. She is both, sometimes in the same breath, and the band behind her has learned to follow wherever she leads. Eleven years of silence, and they pick up not where they left off but somewhere braver.