About

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—a perfect backdrop to their prismatic meditations on time and mortality, love in its many forms, and the increasingly surreal dissonance of modern life.

Produced by Alabama Shakes and their repeat collaborator Shawn Everett, I Must Be Dreaming 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. — (via Label)

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I Must Be Dreaming, the first new album from Alabama Shakes in more than a decade, revives what made the band so delectable in the 2010s: retro-soul hooks sent through lo-fi filters, blistering blues basslines, and a half-tab of psychedelia trip-sat by Howard’s unimpeachable voice, which could sing an end-user license agreement. Though much of I Must Be Dreaming reintroduces Alabama Shakes as a band who can shake off the dust and rock out to the personal and political with equal verve, it does tend to hide in the safety of its more cookie-cutter moments.

The biggest innovation on I Must Be Dreaming is its direct address of the political climate, and the album opens with a foreboding, militant march which refuses imperial aggression from its first lines: “If I had an army,” Howard sings, “I'd march them back home/Back to their rivers, their wildflowers, their soil.” “How many folks got shot this week?” Howard asks on “American Dream,” a festering slow-burn that feels like the road map for a more caustic and critical project. Less affecting is a song like “I Feel Hope Coming,” which sounds dangerously poised to become the Kamala 2028 campaign walkout song after doing time in the Pandora shuffle algorithm. — (via Pitchfork)

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The comeback album is fraught with pitfalls. Often, when a band takes a long break and finally returns with a new record, the result is overcooked and overthought, bearing all the signs of its protracted birth. This isn’t an allegation you could level at ‘I Must Be Dreaming’, Alabama Shakes’ first album in over a decade. As its name suggests, this is a laidback, dreamy collection of psychedelic-soul-influenced songs, though there are two sides to its subject matter.

On the one hand, it’s a protest against America’s Trump-directed fall from grace, with the trio asking: can this actually be real? On the other, it’s a punch-drunk paean to life itself – the ethereal ‘Easy’ finds singer Brittany Howard expressing delighted disbelief that her relationship with her fiancée could be so fulfilling and secure. The tension at the heart of this record is its defining feature, as the Shakes explore the contradiction between domestic bliss and the nightmarish political climate that rages outside the front door of the proverbial happy home.— (via NME)

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— Pressed on Sky Blue vinyl
— Includes printed inner sleeve

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Label: Island Records
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition, Sky Blue
Released: 2026
Genre: Rock
Style:

File under: Alternative / Indie / Pop
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