About

Brittany Howard tends to get a little restless when things get too comfortable. Just when she and her band Alabama Shakes were branded as innocuous roots-rock revivalists after their 2012 debut, Boys & Girls, she started pushing their retro-soul sound to its outer reaches and beyond. Sound & Color, from 2015, sprawled out into blues and funk and psychedelia, and won three Grammys doing it. Amid the Shakes’ growing popularity, Howard deviated from the course. In 2018, emotionally spent, she called a meeting of her Shakes bandmates to announce that she’d be stepping away for a bit after a spell of writer’s block; she didn’t know what she’d be doing next, but she’d be doing it on her own. In retreating from Alabama Shakes, Brittany Howard found herself on a voyage of self-discovery.

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From that process comes her solo debut, Jaime, which is full of that same restless energy. Unlike her work with her bands—including the amped-up rock group Thunderbitch and the alt-country outfit Bermuda Triangle—it speaks solely to the life she’s led, the love and hatred she’s faced, and the way they’ve shaped her worldview. Jaime is a daring turn in just about every way imaginable: bolder, freakier, riskier, more experimental, not just deeply personal but cuttingly political, sometimes quietly tender, sometimes brutally direct. Working in a greenhouse in Topanga Canyon, she mined her complicated personal history, first writing out a memoir of her life up until the founding of Alabama Shakes, then transposing it to songwriting. Howard has said that she needed to be in full control to make this record, and it’s easy to see why: It is the kind of soul-baring opus that first requires soul-searching. - Pitchfork