Alabama Shakes - I Must Be Dreaming Reivew

Eleven years after Sound & Color, Alabama Shakes return with a sprawling, psychedelic record that is at its best when it gives its extraordinary musicians room to breathe.

It’s been over a decade since Alabama Shakes’ last album, Sound & Color, a record that has only grown in stature with time. From the haunting title-track opener to the pained final moments of ‘Over My Head’, it remains one of the finest records of the 2010s, the kind of dense album that can take ten listens before everything begins to reveal itself. Sound & Color also arrived at a time when the hugely popular indie bands of the mid-2000s had largely disappeared from the centre of popular culture. Alabama Shakes felt like a shining light in that landscape, proof that a guitar band could still sound genuinely exciting without regurgitating what had come before. Then, aside from two excellent Brittany Howard solo albums, they disappeared for eleven years.

There’s something strange about finally receiving in 2026 the follow-up to Sound & Color that once felt desperately needed. The musical landscape has changed, as have the people listening to it, but crucially Alabama Shakes don’t seem interested in pretending those eleven years haven’t happened either. When Brittany Howard, Heath Fogg and Zac Cockrell began playing together again in late 2024, there was initially no intention of making another album. Songs emerged gradually, with the band determined to create as the people they are now, not those who made Boys & Girls and Sound & Color in their twenties.

‘Tea Time’ opens the album with thick walking bass and flutes, immediately introducing the psychedelic colour and studio experimentation that runs throughout I Must Be Dreaming. Strikingly, though, it’s one of the record’s less immediately gripping moments, meandering a little too much as its layers begin to accumulate. It introduces a tension that repeatedly surfaces across the album. Alabama Shakes have once again worked with Shawn Everett, who produced Sound & Color, but his maximalist instincts don’t always play to the band’s greatest strengths.

‘Time’ is one of the strongest songs on the album, really finding itself melodically as it builds. There’s a gorgeous refrain as Howard wails, “Time holds out her hands to everyone”. Across the song, there’s a weariness with constantly having to achieve, prove yourself and keep up, eventually giving way to the realisation that what matters is simply having enough time with the people you love. The track ends with a maximalism that truly works, erupting into a cacophony of sound. This sounds like Alabama Shakes having fun. They throw everything at the wall: ticking clocks, drum fills, chugging guitars, all building towards something almost Beatles-esque in its ‘A Day in the Life’ scale and chaos.

For all its psychedelic sprawl, I Must Be Dreaming is remarkably preoccupied with something simple: care. How to care for a partner, how to allow somebody to care for you, how to care for yourself as time disappears, and what it might look like to build a society that actually cares for the people living within it.

The personal and political frequently end up asking the same question. ‘Tea Time’ imagines power redirected away from violence and towards protection and peace, while ‘I Feel Hope Coming’ turns towards clean air, work, housing and militarisation without allowing that frustration to collapse into nihilism. Yet its answer remains hope, love and resilience. The safety and peace Howard searches for within relationships elsewhere on I Must Be Dreaming become something she also demands from the world around her.

It’s when I Must Be Dreaming gives itself room to breathe that Alabama Shakes sound at their most extraordinary. ‘Easy’, ‘Friends’ and ‘Garden’ are three immediate standouts, precisely because of how much space they leave around themselves. There’s a warmth to those songs that comes from being able to hear the individual pieces breathe, with Howard’s voice taking centre stage and the melodies given space to properly sink in. There’s an interesting symmetry between form and subject here too. On an album frequently concerned with finding a version of love that feels safe, nurturing and properly cared for, some of its warmest songs are also its least cluttered.

That isn’t always the case elsewhere. Everett has a tendency towards maximalism, and there are moments on I Must Be Dreaming where that instinct begins to work against the band. Alabama Shakes are already capable of creating an enormous sound without much assistance; when additional layers start piling up, some of the record’s strongest melodies become strangely difficult to locate. These are exceptionally expressive musicians individually, and there are moments where stripping something away might actually have made everything else hit harder.

‘Waist Deep’ is another Beatles-y number, its crunchy piano moving up in semitones while acoustic guitars give Howard plenty of space vocally. It feels warm, lived-in and sentimental, almost like a spiritual follow-up to Howard’s solo track ‘Stay High’. Lyrically, it sits close to the album’s central themes of care and the ways hurt gets passed between people, with Howard asking where all that pain goes when someone can’t take any more. It also contains one of the loveliest fuzzed-up guitar lines on the record, the kind of simple melodic flourish that makes you wish I Must Be Dreaming had found room for a few more moments like it.

‘American Dream’, by contrast, is considerably cooler and stranger. There’s something almost proggy about its slow, dense construction, while Howard turns the promise of the American Dream into something increasingly absurd. Peace, happiness, opportunity and freedom are placed against low wages, gun violence and political dysfunction, finally giving the album’s title its clearest meaning: dreaming as aspiration, but also disbelief at the reality unfolding around you.

The album closes with ‘Tied To You’, which brings I Must Be Dreaming back towards the hazier, more psychedelic territory in which it began. It isn’t one of the record’s strongest moments on first impression, but it certainly has “grower” written all over it. After spending so much time considering how we care for one another on both a personal and societal level, Howard ultimately brings everything back down to the vulnerability of admitting that you love someone.

Eleven years later, Alabama Shakes sound older, stranger and perhaps occasionally too excited by everything available to them in the studio. But when I Must Be Dreaming finds the right balance between experimentation and restraint, there are moments here every bit as affecting as the band’s finest work. Maybe the more impenetrable parts will reveal themselves with time too. Sound & Color certainly did. For now, this is an imperfect but frequently extraordinary return from a band that still sounds unlike almost anyone else.