Alabama Shakes - I Must Be Dreaming Alabama Shakes

I Must Be Dreaming is the first new album from Alabama Shakes in more than a decade. The album expands on 2015’s album Sound & Color’s unfettered exploration, leaning toward a viscerally charged form of psychedelic soul.

Produced by Alabama Shakes and their repeat collaborator Shawn Everett, the album came to life at Nashville’s Sound Emporium Studios and Blackbird Studio. While the album sustains their signature intensity, its songs often wander into more lush and otherworldly terrain, revealing a more exacting command of atmosphere and space.

Alabama Shakes have always moved according to their own dream logic, frequently following their deepest instincts to magnificently strange ends. After forming in 2009, the Athens, AL-bred band exploded onto the scene as a seismic new force in rock & roll, swiftly cementing that legacy with just two albums: 2012’s Boys & Girls (a massively acclaimed LP whose lead single “Hold On” topped Rolling Stone’s list of the year’s best songs) and 2015’s Sound & Color (a Billboard 200 No. 1 debut that notched four Grammy wins, including Best Alternative Music Album). Arriving more than a decade after its predecessor, their new album I Must Be Dreaming expands on Sound & Color’s unfettered exploration, leaning toward a viscerally charged form of psychedelic soul—a perfect backdrop to their prismatic meditations on time and mortality, love in its many forms, and the increasingly surreal dissonance of modern life.

The third studio album from vocalist/guitarist Brittany Howard, guitarist Heath Fogg, and bassist Zac Cockrell, I Must Be Dreaming began taking shape in late 2024, when Alabama Shakes met up with no real intentions beyond playing music together again. As they built off a batch of demos Cockrell had recorded in his home studio, the band gradually made their way toward an entire album’s worth of material. “It was different from how we worked in the past, when we’d show up with the songs almost finished and just go in and record,” says Howard. “With this album everything was coming together in real time—we were never sure what would happen next, and that felt exciting.” Wholly embracing that unpredictability, Alabama Shakes tapped into the rarefied chemistry at the heart of the band—an element further reignited on their ardently received 2025 North American headline run. “When it came time to relearn our older songs for the tour, I realized there was a magic to them that I’d never fully appreciated,” Cockrell points out. And by reconnecting with that magic in the writing process, the band ultimately found an undeniable path forward. “I’m proud of us for coming from a very honest place on this record instead of trying to go back and create from the perspective of people in their 20s,” says Howard. “The album reflects what’s going on in our lives right now, and there’s real truth in all these songs.”

Produced by Alabama Shakes and their repeat collaborator Shawn Everett (a six-time Grammy winner who’s also worked with The War on Drugs, Alvvays, Miley Cyrus, The Killers, and more), I Must Be Dreaming came to life at Nashville’s Sound Emporium Studios and Blackbird Studio, where the band took full advantage of the extensive stash of unusual instruments (e.g., harpsichord, sitar, flute). While the album sustains their signature intensity, its songs often wander into more lush and otherworldly terrain, revealing a more exacting command of atmosphere and space. “Some of my favorite songs from our older records are the softer, sweeter, more ethereal songs, so I enjoyed moving into that direction even more on this album,” says Fogg. “We’d also talked early on about the record being about someone walking up from a dream state, and it feels right to take the psychedelic route to tell that kind of story.” To that end, the title to I Must Be Dreaming nods to the mystifying duality of the present moment. “There’s a double meaning to it,” notes Howard. “It could be saying, ‘I must be dreaming, because the world is so fucking crazy right now.’ But it could also mean, ‘I must be dreaming, because the world is so incredibly beautiful.’ Both those things can be true at once.”

One of the first songs created for I Must Be Dreaming, “Time” arrives as a gloriously sprawling contemplation of the fleeting nature of life. In an exhilarating first for Alabama Shakes, the spellbinding slow-burner surges toward an improvised free-for-all in its final two minutes, summoning an ecstatic frenzy with its stormy rhythms and chaotic guitar work. Looking back on that burst of unguarded spontaneity, Fogg compares the song’s formation to the band’s long-held ritual of creating group drawings. “Someone will start a drawing and then pass it and the next person will add to it, and it always turns into something unique,” he says. “That’s how that jam felt to me—really pure and fun, all of us exploring together.”

Endlessly straddling the line between reverie and reckoning, I Must Be Dreaming also channels a wild-eyed euphoria on tracks like “Another Life,” a feverishly searching piece that morphs from R&B to psych-rock as Howard raises the possibility that love might outlast a single lifetime. “I think there’s comfort in the idea that you might end up meeting someone’s soul again, even if they pass on or walk out of your life,” she says. On “Easy,” Alabama Shakes offer up a blissed-out love song that speaks to the quiet rapture of feeling truly safe with a partner. “It’s about being with someone who actually makes your life easier, after doing it the hard way for most of your life,” says Howard. “I wrote it for my fiancée but we can’t listen to it together; we’ll cry.” Meanwhile, “Garden” slips into a sweet delirium in its reflection on the constant care required for love to bloom. To sculpt the song’s enchanting sound, Cockrell stepped behind the drum kit while drummer/vibraphonist Lewis Wright (Michael Kiwanuka, Wynton Marsalis) dreamed up its majestic piano interlude. “At first that song wasn’t clicking,” Fogg recalls. “But then Lewis killed it on piano and Zac killed it on drums, and you could just feel the energy change in a very inspiring way.”

Another song born from in-studio experimentation, the album-opening “Tea Time” emerged after Alabama Shakes’ longtime keyboardist Paul Horton laid down a hypnotic flute melody, and soon evolved into an elaborate manifesto: a heart-centered vision of power that trades defense and destruction for protection and peace. “The flutes sparked this medieval imagery in my mind, and I started thinking about how the world we live in now feels like feudalism,” says Howard. “Some people have so much; so many others are just scraping by. Our leaders are supposed to take care of us and take care of the land, but they’re mostly just chasing wealth.” Later, I Must Be Dreaming drifts into the luminous textures and childlike harmonies of “I Feel Hope Coming (It’s Good To Be Clean),” a tender yet galvanizing call to resist systems that dehumanize and move toward a future defined by collective care. “This younger generation makes me feel hopeful because they can see through all the political lies—that song’s about holding onto that hope, and refusing to give up,” says Howard. “I’m really happy that song exists,” Fogg adds. “It came from such a joyful moment of collaboration, and exemplifies everything I love about this band being reborn.”

In a thrilling late-album turn, I Must Be Dreaming builds to the raw and rumbling urgency of penultimate track “American Dream”—a prime showcase for Howard’s powerhouse vocal work. One of the LP’s most sublimely heavy moments, “American Dream” traces the steady unraveling of once-shared ideals, simultaneously telegraphing disillusionment and defiant hope. “It’s a snapshot of what we’re living through in 2026,” says Howard. “I look around and wonder how we got to a place where there’s so much strain and so little support. I mean, it shouldn’t be impossible to take off work so you can bring your child to the doctor—that’s actually insane. My hope is that one day people will hear this album and say, ‘Yeah, shit was crazy back then, but we made it through.’”

In keeping with Alabama Shakes’ extraordinary knack for collapsing genre boundaries, I Must Be Dreaming merges funk-rooted grooves, frenetic punk rhythms, and hip-hop-leaning vocal cadence on “How Love’s Supposed To Go,” a desperate plea for open-heartedness. “It’s coming from the viewpoint of loving someone who’s convinced that everyone’s going to do them wrong,” says Howard. “You’re trying to prove you’re different and telling them, ‘I’m not like that. Just let me in.’” Flipping the script both sonically and emotionally, the moody and ravishing “Tied To You” captures the sticky tension between craving independence and longing to surrender to love. “There’s two voices in that song: one is the internal thought process, the other is saying everything out loud,” explains Howard, who refers to the album’s final number as “psychedelic Sade.” “We got that idea because there was a glitch in the recording and two vocal tracks started playing at once—it was this cool moment of accidental discovery, and we followed its lead.”

For all the hazy allure of Alabama Shakes’ music, their songs cut through with a real-world impact. “Over the years we’ve had people tell us that songs like ‘Hold On’ have helped them get through a tough time, and I’m really thankful that our music can have that kind of effect,” says Cockrell. And with I Must Be Dreaming, Alabama Shakes hope to leave an even more immediate imprint, inspiring listeners toward greater presence instead of numbness or retreat. “I want people to stop living so much in fear, because I’ve seen how fear disconnects you from yourself and from others,” says Howard. “I know we’re in very scary and uncertain times, but we need to find certainty and strength within ourselves, because that’s what helps us keep going. Fear is real, but so are hope and love and community—and those are the things worth pouring yourself into.”