It’s been fifteen years since Alabama Shakes released their debut EP, which catapulted the small-town southern band into an unlikely few years of stardom. The group’s early music was lo-fi, vintage-leaning, and just twee enough to make the scrappy garage rockers an emblem of early-mid aughts Urban Outfitters hipsterdom. Brittany Howard, the band’s lead singer and charismatic frontwoman, has spent much of the past decade refuting that notion. With the band’s daring second album, 2015’s Sound + Color, and her subsequent solo records, Howard has established herself less like the retro revivalist her band were pegged as and more as a Prince-like figure: mercurial, continually searching, and uninterested in conventional genre.
Now Howard has returned to the band that jumpstarted her career. What better way to exemplify her ongoing artistic metamorphosis than to apply that ethos to the band most people still associate with “Hold On.” I Must Be Dreaming, Alabama Shakes’ third record — and their first in more than a decade — is a surprising and welcome reintroduction that shows off entirely new sides of the upstart group without ever abandoning what made their early records so thrilling. It is, among other things, a grown up record, both musically and narratively: There are songs about wistful regret and hard-won hope, songs about the disintegrating state of the country, songs about, well, watering gardens. Some songs (“Garden”) sound like they could have been written before World War II. Others (“Tea Time”) feel like astral projections from the Afrofuturistic landscape Howard has been exploring in her solo career.
Reunited as a three-piece, Howard, bassist Zack Cockrell and guitarist Heath Fogg sound reinvigorated. “Another Life” is a chamber-soul epic that features an acrobatic, emotive Howard vocal performance, subtle bass playing from Cockrell alongside congas and glockenspiel, and a spearing, mostly one-note solo from Howard. It sounds both nothing the band has ever done before, and like something you would have hoped they would’ve eventually arrived at had they kept making records right after Sound + Color.
After establishing herself so firmly as a solo artist in recent years, it’s almost shocking to hear how at home Howard feels exploring new sounds with the comfort of her longest collaborators. Some songs rest entirely in the steady warmth of her collaborators’ playing: There’s the electric piano from the band’s longtime accompanying keyboardist Ben Tanner setting the tone on “Waist Deep,” an album highlight (“Is all this hard stuff behind me?” Howard sings). There’s the way Cockrell and Fogg’s creeping bass-guitar interplay on “American Dream” tells the story of alienation and political unrest better than Howard’s associative lyrics can (Cockrell’s melodic bass, which is mixed front and center, is almost a lead instrument on this record). Then there’s the centerpiece, “I Feel Hope Coming,” which traverses genres and sounds (Curtis Mayfield soul, mid-century standards, sixties psychedelia) without even making a listener feel any bumps in the ride.
That Howard hasn’t sounded this at home — and this herself — in years is not just heartwarming; it makes the case that this band remains one of the most effective ways of communicating the rock-soul-funk-pop she hears inside her head. On the album closer “Tied To You,” one of several songs of romantic remorse and what-ifs, Howard ponders the past and contemplates longtime connection. “There’s no going back/Whatever that was,” she sings, seemingly singing about a consequential lover. But, at times, it feels like she could also be addressing this ode to her band: “I’m tied to your horse.”
