Alabama Shakes Stay Observational, Yet Optimistic on New LP 'I Must Be Dreaming'

It doesn’t feel like hyperbole to say that the world is a completely different place than it was when the Alabama Shakes last put out a record. Since the group released its sophomore album Sound & Color back in 2015, Donald Trump was elected president (twice), the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements stirred up some much-needed social reckoning, and an insurrection, pandemic, multiple wars, countless climate disasters took place. Roe v. Wade was overturned and politicians assassinated. It’s been a seemingly infinite parade of major events bumping each other out of the news cycle. 

“I think something happened since COVID where it feels like the world has sped up,” frontwoman Brittany Howard posits. “It's like we closed our eyes and we opened them, and it was a whole different world. And not necessarily wonderful, either. I think all of us walk around with this internal dialogue in our internal lives…so to open your eyes and look around, it's just like, ‘I must be dreaming.’ It doesn't have to be negative. It doesn't have to be taken like that, but that's what it feels like.”

Hence the title of the Shakes’ first album in more than a decade, I Must Be Dreaming. While the 11-track LP (released August 28 via Island Records) pulls inspiration from that post-pandemic haze, COVID is also indirectly responsible for its very existence: After their years-long hiatus, Howard, Zac Cockrell, and Heath Fogg reunited in 2024 to perform at a benefit concert to raise money for Druid City Brewing Company, a Tuscaloosa brewery owned by their friend Bo Hicks that had been struggling financially due to the pandemic. Hicks was one of the band’s earliest supporters — “He always put us up, we always had something to eat, always had a place to sleep,” Howard says — so it only felt right for them to come together for him.

“I went up there on stage and I played a couple songs by myself from my solo albums, and I told the crowd like, ‘Oh, I forgot my electric guitar, I'll be right back,’” Howard recalls. “Walked offstage, came back out with Zac and Heath. And we played the song for everybody, and everybody was just like super stoked, super excited. It was a good feeling. And through that process, we were like, ‘Okay, Sound & Color has been 10 years. Let's go play some music for some people.’ We kept doing that, then it turned into like, ‘Oh, maybe we should play some new songs. We should write some new songs.’ And then it kind of snowballed into like, ‘Let's make an EP,’ and then it turned into ‘Let's make an album.’ So here we are. It kind of happened very naturally.”