Alabama Shakes will release ‘I Must Be Dreaming,’ their first album in 11 years, on Aug. 28 via Island, led by new single ‘I Feel Hope Coming’
The long silence after Sound & Color always felt unresolved, less like an ending than a held breath. Alabama Shakes have finally exhaled. The band announced I Must Be Dreaming, their third studio album and first in 11 years, arriving August 28 via Island Records, alongside the new single “I Feel Hope Coming.” The record was produced by the band with Shawn Everett, the six-time Grammy winner who engineered Sound & Color, and tracked in Nashville at Sound Emporium Studios and Blackbird Studio.
That personnel detail matters. Sound & Color was the album where a scrappy Athens, Alabama bar band mutated into something stranger and more ambitious, trading garage-soul revivalism for space-echo psychedelia, and it won them Grammys and a No. 1 debut in the process. Reuniting with Everett signals that the band, now the trio of Brittany Howard, Heath Fogg, and Zac Cockrell, is picking up that experimental thread rather than retreating to the comfort of Boys & Girls nostalgia. Early reports bear that out: the sessions reportedly grew out of an open-ended, improvisational process, folding flute, harpsichord, sitar, and dense vocal stacking into the band’s palette.
A Title That Cuts Both Ways
Howard has described the album’s title as deliberately double-edged, a phrase that can register as disbelief at a world gone senseless or as awe that it remains, in her words, “because the world is so incredibly beautiful.” Both readings, she insists, can be true at once. That tension, between dread and wonder, sits at the center of a record that a press release frames as psychedelic soul preoccupied with love, mortality, human connection, and the surreal contradictions of modern life.
“I Feel Hope Coming” is the thesis statement. Built from warm acoustic textures, dreamy keys, and Howard’s voice at its most assured, the song is pitched as the emotional heart of the album, an understated anthem about choosing optimism anyway. Howard traces it to watching a younger generation see through political noise, describing the song as about “holding onto that hope, and refusing to give up.” Fogg, for his part, calls it proof of “everything I love about this band being reborn.” It follows last August’s “Another Life,” the band’s first new music in a decade, and April’s pointed “American Dream,” all three of which appear on the 11-track sequence.
The Road Back From Hiatus
The path here was not linear. Alabama Shakes went quiet in 2018, and Howard spent the interim becoming a formidable solo artist across 2019’s Jaime and 2024’s What Now, records that pushed her further into funk, ambient gospel, and electronic texture. The reunion arrived as a genuine surprise in December 2024, when Howard, booked for a solo hometown show in Alabama, brought Fogg and Cockrell onstage instead. Studio photos followed within weeks. Former drummer Steve Johnson is not part of the reformed lineup, and the band continues as a three-piece.
Now the machine is fully in motion. The band is currently threading European festivals before a North American run kicks off July 24 in Tacoma, a stretch that includes their first-ever headlining show at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on September 2, co-headline dates with Tedeschi Trucks Band, and stadium support slots for Zach Bryan before wrapping September 26 at Ohana Festival. It is the itinerary of a band behaving like the hiatus never happened. Whether I Must Be Dreaming can extend the creative streak Sound & Color started is the real question, but on the evidence so far, Alabama Shakes are not treating their return as a victory lap. They are treating it like unfinished business.
I Must Be Dreaming tracklist
“Tea Time,” “Another Life,” “Garden,” “I Feel Hope Coming,” “Time,” “Friends,” “Easy,” “How Love’s Supposed To Go,” “Waist Deep,” “American Dream,” and “Tied To You.”
