Alabama Shakes Are Back — and Breaking New Ground — on ‘I Must Be Dreaming’

It’s been fifteen years since Alabama Shakes released their debut EP, which catapulted the small-town southern band into an unlikely few years of stardom. The group’s early music was lo-fi, vintage-leaning, and just twee enough to make the scrappy garage rockers an emblem of early-mid aughts Urban Outfitters hipsterdom. Brittany Howard , the band’s lead singer and charismatic frontwoman, has spent much of the past decade refuting that notion. With the band’s daring second album, 2015’s Sound + Color , and her subsequent solo records, Howard has established herself less like the retro revivalist her band were pegged as and more as a Prince-like figure: mercurial, continually searching, and uninterested in conventional genre.

Now Howard has returned to the band that jumpstarted her career. What better way to exemplify her ongoing artistic metamorphosis than to apply that ethos to the band most people still associate with “ Hold On. ” I Must Be Dreaming , Alabama Shakes’ third record — and their first in more than a decade — is a surprising and welcome reintroduction that shows off entirely new sides of the upstart group without ever abandoning what made their early records so thrilling. It is, among other things, a grown up record, both musically and narratively: There are songs about wistful regret and hard-won hope, songs about the disintegrating state of the country, songs about, well, watering gardens. Some songs (“Garden”) sound like they could have been written before World War II. Others (“Tea Time”) feel like astral projections from the Afrofuturistic landscape Howard has been exploring in her solo career.