are one of those bands who punctuate their identity with vivid self-expression: examining social ills and the heart’s demands next to grooves that can divide your soul into two. They’re dreamweavers, in a sense — bona fide rock ‘n’ rollers that slow-poured the garage-soul complexions of 2012’s ‘’ and 2015’s ‘’ into four Grammy dubs and a fandom that isn’t shy to transition ‘Superfly!’ into ‘Houses Of The Holy’. Their highs hit a halt in 2018 with a hiatus pooling into family time, a hardcore side-project, and a pair of solo releases (‘’, ‘’) but like any good thing, the Athens, Alabama outfit fell into each other in due time with a Druid City Brewing Company set back in 2024 posing the question: “What if?”. 

The result being ‘’ — a natural continuation of the trio’s throwback coolness that chronicles the urges, confusions, and reflections that the heart endures. It sits somewhere in the afterglow of ‘Obscured By Clouds’ and ‘A Whole New Thing’ but it finds (vocals/guitar), (bass), and (guitar) skating around influences that are immersive, not synthetic. There are supremely chill daydreams (‘Easy’, ‘’), outros rooted in the psychedelic liberation of ‘Ladyland’ (‘Time’, ‘Another Life’), and a fistful of ‘70s-steeped funk jaunts (‘Tea Time’, ‘How Love’s Supposed To Go’) that levitate with hip-hop sensibilities. They’re trippy, communal, and loose, and to a degree, unapologetically Shakes. 

“At the end of the day, we are all walking around out there trying to see if anybody else feels the same way as us,” Howard explains while enjoying a bit of downtime at her home in Nashville. “I feel like that’s what I try to do in my music, whether it’s conscious or not, it’s just that connection. It’s like sending a message in a bottle in the ocean — like maybe somebody will find this and they’ll understand me and see me for who I am and also see themselves in that.”

With ‘’ out this week via Island, we connected with Brittany Howard to chat about the band’s third album, how their seven-year break stirred up a brighter shade of curiosity, and why their new stuff meditates on a period of uncertainty and a love for music that’s timeless.

Given how much of a life you have already lived, do you still find comfort in exploring the art that lies behind curiosity and how music allows you to put your own freedom first?

Yeah, and that’s why I have so many projects. I think that’s a part of it. I think it’s always been an exploration of expression. I never considered myself to be one thing or limited to do one thing. 

How important is the concept of expression to you now compared to when the band first started touring and playing shows around ‘Boys & Girls’?

I think when I was younger… well, you know, when you’re young and you have never been anywhere, the world seems so big and you just want to get out there. You want to connect with as many people as you can and you want to learn from them. You just can’t wait to see the next day and see what it brings you. I feel like I still have that curiosity in me but it comes from a place of self-exploration; the exploration of relationships and the people around me, and the musical traditions that have been before and how I can explore that deeper. 

At what point did creative process start to turn into a job for you?

I’d say when there was so much on the schedule that I couldn’t just go play music. Whenever that was [laughs].

What would you say was the biggest realisation you had about your connection to music during that downtime?

I think the realisation was that when it comes to me and my creative flow, I can’t sit around an instrument or sit in front of a computer all day and have new ideas. It’s not a 100 per cent “on all the time” kind of thing for me. I actually have to not think about music and just go live my life and let music find me — whether it’s meeting a new person and getting into the stuff that they’re into. 

That’s how I first started discovering music when I was younger. When I was 14, I got some new friends and they liked Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and I was like, “Oh I actually like this”, you know? It kind of let my own curiosity find new people and find new music and then I started getting curious again. So one thing I have learned is to step away. 

Do you have any regrets about the group’s decision to take a hiatus? Or do you think it elevated your chemistry to a place that really wouldn’t be possible if you continued the same trajectory after 2018?

Yeah, but you know I feel like that’s a subjective question because who knows? From my point of view and also from talking to the fellas, we needed a break anyway because the guys were having kids and they wanted to be there to watch their kids grow up. And at the same time, I just felt like I needed a change of scenery. Like I needed to not be in a bus or be in an airplane. I wanted to spend time in the world just being Brittany and not “Brittany the singer”, you know? I think that time was helpful, for sure. 

One of the more fascinating aspects of your new record ‘I Must Be Dreaming’ is the way it addresses the various shapes to love, mortality, and the dissonance of modern life. What inspired you to want to underline the duality of the present moment?

I’m just an observer. I mean, there’s duality everywhere — like there’s duality in myself — and I’m just being observant of those things. Our internal world influences how we see the world but at the same time, what we experience in this external world is also what shapes ourselves. So it’s kind of taking a look at both of those things and seeing that’s not a new thing. That has been happening since the dawn of time. So I wanted to write something that could really be played at any time and still make sense. It made us make a really human album, I think.

There is a sense of timelessness to the album because while it’s nearly 10 years removed from your last project, the same sentiments are there and the same distinct voice is there — they’re just being refracted through the prism in a different way. 

That’s a good way of saying it. I mean, that’s just a part of growing older. You get a little softer, a little wiser, and I enjoyed looking at things through a different part of the prism, you know? I feel like I see more because my mind’s less busy with “Am I enough of this? Am I enough of that? Do I belong here? Or do I belong there?”. At the end of the day, I belong to myself and for me, it took experience to realise that. 

Do you feel more at peace now?

In some ways, yes. I’m not sure how old you are and I don’t mean to talk about age like that because it doesn’t really matter, but I think experience matters and I think hearing my mother and my grandmothers always talk about their experiences helped a lot. 

I’d always ask them “What’s it like to be 30? What’s it like to be 65?” and their own answers would always be so interesting to me because my grandma would go “Well, I still feel like I’m 18 in my mind but my body is older” and my mother would be like, “Oh, it sucks because my back hurts”. She was 30 and complaining about her back but my grandma had the wisdom to say that she still felt curious and young — she ain’t worried about her externals. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I just think there was a lesson in there somewhere [laughs]. 

I’m in my 30s now and you mentioned recently how much the band has changed since your early 20s because you were a lot wilder then. That made me think about that time period for myself and how I couldn’t imagine having that kind of fun now. 

Oh my God, are you kidding me? Yeah, no [laughs].

Like there are some days where you wake up and your neck hurts because you slept on it wrong. And that alone will take you out for two weeks.

Yo, it’s so crazy [laughs]. It’s like everything my mom said was true [laughs].

With ‘I Must Be Dreaming’ being such an organic extension of ‘Boys & Girls’ and ‘Sound & Color’, what influenced you to take things into a more ethereal direction?

I think it was always there. Ever since ‘Sound & Color’, it was something that we were always interested in. We wrote a lot of songs for ‘Sound & Color’ and not everything made it but this was kind of something we could have written, and just didn’t. It’s just another part of things we like and things that inspire us and this time, it just flowed out as it’s what we wanted.

Is it true that you have been listening to more instrumental music?

This is true. There is this fella out of Ohio — his name is Okonski [the pianist for Durand Jones & The Indications] and I really, really like his music. I think he’s kinda got a three-piece, trio thing going on and there’s something very timeless about his compositions as they’re very meditative. 

I’ve been listening to a lot of instrumentals because it lets the mind wander. I’m not so caught up on song structure or lyrics or meaning because when you’re a writer, you have this voice in the back of your head that’s like, “Oh, how’d they do that? How’d they do this?”. When I’m just listening to music and especially when it’s more experimental — artists like Floating Points and Pharaoh Sanders — it lets my mind be free. I don’t have to worry. I don’t fully understand what I’m listening to as it’s this person’s expression but that to me is really freeing and really inspiring. Like I can come up with all kinds of ideas. 

When did you realise you had an attachment to using music as a form of reverie? And did that come from growing up in a mixed household?

I spent a lot of time as a child alone and I did a lot of imagining. I grew up on a farm that was also a junkyard and when I was a little, I would go outside and play all day by myself and I was completely content with that. Later, my parents got divorced and we lived in this little apartment, which was completely different, completely different. It was more like a city setting as there was concrete everywhere and the woods were very far away, and I had to, once again, pivot and figure out how to withstand it. That’s when I turned to music. 

When did it click for you and the rest of the group that the demos you were working on were starting to shape what would be your third album?

Oh you know, I think it was easy. It was just excitement. I would hear one of those demos from the guys and I would just be like, “Ooh”. Sometimes I’d say, “I don’t know what to do with that” but it’s still very exciting. Like some of the basslines Zach was playing, I never really heard anything like that and that’s always inspiring to me because as a writer, it can become anything. 

That’s kind of what happened. Some songs were trial and error because we just didn’t know what to do with them as they could go so many places and some we knew exactly what to do, and I could sit down and write the lyrics and the song was done in 15 minutes. Every one of these tracks has their own story.  

What does the title ‘I Must Be Dreaming’ mean to you?

‘I Must Be Dreaming’ means so many different things to me… a part of it is that the world today doesn’t feel real but it’s very much real. The world today happens so fast, you know? There’s a lot of makings to today but it seems like that at some point it just sped up so fast that all of us are spinning around. And you’ll turn around and look and go “What happened?”, you know? Because it feels like a whole new place. Like “I must be dreaming”. And the other part of it is “I must be dreaming” because here I am with my friends making music again and here we are doing some of my favourite things with some of my favourite people. 

And the other part of that is “I must be dreaming” between times of uncertainty and finding little parcels of joy and happiness in watching something grow and hoping for its future, and fighting for its future. It’s all of those things. There’s something about the album artwork that struck me when I first saw what seemed to be a portal and a ball rolling through this window of, I’d say, an unknown future. Who knows what’s on the other side? Where are we rolling to? Collectively, so to speak. 

As someone who has never shied away from communicating how your heart truly feels, is there a track from the album that was difficult to write or put a bow on?

The first song that pops into my mind is ‘How’s Love Supposed To Go’. I wrote the lyrics and the melodies to it in probably three different ways because I wasn’t sure how it was supposed to go [laughs]. And I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to sing about. The first thing it reminded me of was chaos and when I think of chaos, I think about a volcano or war — something destructive, something uncontrollable. I thought maybe I should just write about that. 

But I also realised that love can also do those same things and wouldn’t that be a funny thing to write about over this urgent music. But sometimes love does feel urgent and sometimes love does feel destructive as it will blow up your whole world if it doesn’t work out. Once I put those two worlds next to each other as a juxtaposition, it became interesting and I figured out how to write about it so I’d definitely say that one took me the longest to put together.

Because of its imagery, what’s the meaning behind the song ‘Garden’?

Simply put, it’s that old saying: “Don’t want something if you’re not going to take care of it”. It’s a song about watching someone you love not be loved by the person they choose to be with. Like you’re just thinking, “If that person was mine, I’d treat them like a garden; I’d take care of them and I’d do everything for them so that they could grow and be the most beautiful form of themselves”. That’s really what the song’s all about.

How important is it to you to write from an honest place?

It’s what I’ve always done. Sometimes I tell stories, not lies, but like “this would make an interesting song if I wrote about it like this”. I tend to get in that space of imagination and then sometimes I’ll sit down and this is how I feel about something, you know? I’ve always heard the advice “write about what you know” and “write about what’s true” and “say it like you mean it”. I just keep things pretty simple. 

With how much has transpired over the years, what has it been like to meet some of your peers like Solange, Tyler The Creator, and Childish Gambino? And are there any lessons or ideologies that you’ve learned through the conversations you’ve had with them?

Absolutely. There is a lot of work ethic that I’m really impressed by. A lot of “if you want to do it, then just do it” which I really learned a lot from. Tyler, you know, he’s someone I admire because he’s so free… creatively [laughs]. He’s going to do whatever he wants to do. When he has an idea or a concept, he really puts everything he into it. I really admire that about him and it’s something that I would like to be more like. 

And then Childish Gambino… Donald is just a multi-faceted creator. He has a mind of not only music but also writing, dialogue, and comedy which makes him such an entirely gifted person. Solange also has a good ear for what is good and I admire all these qualities about them and one thing that I’ve learned from them is that energy of “what are you waiting for?”. Those are qualities that I admire and I’d like to see in myself.

With what you’ve experienced through creative resets and reinvention, do you still feel like the only job you have in this life is to explore your own creativity?

It’s not even just creativity, I think it’s just expression in general. I think that’s my job in this life; to express, to experience, to play, to learn. I don’t know if I need it to be much deeper than that or even to be confined to the music space which is such a divine space. There’s just so much more around me all the time now.

Do you see ‘I Must Be Dreaming’ as the start of a new chapter for Alabama Shakes? Or is there less of a plan now as the band is just kind of seeing where this goes?

I think we’re all seeing how it goes. If it’s fun and it’s curious and we’re all creative together, then of course we’re going to keep making music together. But like I said earlier, time is precious. We all have families and all have people in our lives who are getting older and while I love making music – I will probably be making music until the day I die – I’m also really invested in being rooted as well. It’ll be interesting to see how those two things can go together.

‘I Must Be Dreaming’ is out now.