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Mein the fall of 2024, Alabama Shakes they showed no sign of ending their standoff – and no one was asking them. Seven years had passed since the blues-soul-rock group, which exploded from Athens, Alabama in 2009, shared the stage for the last time. Their transatlantic Top 10 2012 debut Boys & Girls announced them; sold a million in 2015 following Sound & Color to No 1 in the US and won four Grammys. Their fans included Bruce Springsteen, Robert Plant and Barack Obama. But by 2017 he was physically and artistically exhausted, and he quit. Then, in December 2024, without warning, they played their first show in over seven years.
“We had a friend in Tuscaloosa who had beer, but it wasn’t good after Covid,” explains singer Brittany Howard. “He called me and said he was going to organize a fundraiser and asked me if I would like to sing.” But then he started to remember, remembering how the friend really helped the group, not just him. He felt that the group owed him, collectively. “So I called the brothers,” he smiles. “‘Do you want to do this – like, all of us, together?’ And immediately he said yes.”
Before long, he found himself rehearsing songs he hadn’t played in years. Then, on 18 December 2024, they played at the 1,000-capacity Bama Theatre, to great reception. Guitarist Heath Fogg remembers the show well. He said: “For me, I felt like I didn’t have a problem. “I was very happy, very grateful … feeling very happy. I haven’t played those songs since our last show. I never even heard someone come into the restaurant or something. Then at the show we knew a lot of people in the crowd but we didn’t tell anyone that we were playing. So it was a surprise – and a lot of fun.”
Howard knew it wouldn’t last. He said: “It was natural to think: ‘Let’s come back, rehearse, write songs, go on tour.'”
Part of the answer is music. It was released in April this year, American Dream – a famous image of a country that is divided and refuses to give up on it – went viral on TikTok and Instagram. Over the course of the next two days, Howard found himself at the center of the cultural conversation after a decade of wildly popular but unrewarding solo work. Describing the lyrics – which address gun violence, climate change, abortion rights, minimum wage and Trump’s White House reforms – as a “picture of 2026”, the singer spoke of his desire for future generations to hear and think: “‘Yeah, shit was crazy before, but we made it.’
The success of this song is very surprising because of the negative nature of protest music in 2026. With the exception of respectable ones such as Bruce Springsteen’s Streets in Minneapolis, the strong response to the murder of Ice by Renée Good and Alex Pretti, or the anger of Lucinda Williams The World’s Gone Wrong, trying hard to fight Trump because he only fights Trump. division, failure to recognize decompositions in a way that starts on both sides of the distribution. At night, Alabama Shakes found their culture again – a group that can be angry and hopeful in the same breath, expressing their feelings to millions of people. As Howard says, “We may have dealt with these issues before, but not in the way we are now.”
We meet in Leeds, the day before they play the city’s Millennium Square – their first European show in a decade. Howard, who will take the stage the next night in a glittering fur coat, is dressed down and badly bruised. Fogg too, but he has been exploring the city, where he has never played, and is very excited to visit Leeds’ oldest home, Whitelock’s. “Built in 1715!” he says, in a soft Alabama drawl. Bassist Zac Cockrell isn’t joining us, and he’s probably still sleeping.
Along with old favorites like Hold On – 225m Spotify streams and counting – the gig will reveal songs from their upcoming third album, I Must Be Dreaming, from their retro lifestyle. It is more ethereal, even psychedelic in places, and songs about relationships, the current state of their world and the movements and dissonance of modern life.
Howard said: “I feel there’s a lot of difference between the first album and the second, but there’s a thread between them and I feel that this song is the same. The opening dream Tea Time is built around, of all things, flutes. So the name Time has a completely psychedelic jam. The first song of the album, Another Life, morphs from R&B into a steady, unwavering rock and sings a big, fun song: “Can we try again? Can we try another life?”
“It’s a way of saying: ‘This relationship is over,'” says Howard, “but maybe in the next life everything will be okay.”
Does this song, on some level, even subconsciously, affect the band? “Maybe when I think about it, because it’s not normal to come back like this,” he says. “Cos it feels good and honest. I’m not forced to do it. When we started the band it was like it was fun playing music with your friends: ‘What’s your favorite song? Getting back together was the same: ‘What are you into now? What have you heard?'”
The three went to the same high school, but they didn’t really know each other. Then Howard saw Cockrell’s T-shirt at the Drive-In and decided they liked the music they’d been making and wanted to play together. “I went up to him in class and played him a CD in his Honda Civic, which was really awkward,” he recalls. “They were breaking the rail and I thought, ‘Oh, they don’t like this.’ But then he said, ‘This is good. Let’s do it.’” Fogg, three years older than them, dropped out of college when he boarded, and the trio fell in love with rock, punk, R&B and the oldies they picked up from their parents: Dionne Warwick, Elvis, Motown.
Howard can pour his heart out as an old-school musician, but he started out as a drummer, gravitating to other instruments out of necessity and only realized he had a voice when his mother heard his tape and said: “I didn’t know you could sing.” He describes his childhood in the Limestone region as a “slow walk,” among “pastures, little birds and wild fires.” Everyone knew each other. Not that he didn’t have a hard life in music. Howard is gay, biracial – his white mother and black father separated when he was eight after his 13-year-old sister Jaime died of retinoblastoma. The singer has said that the incident caused a “rain cloud over our family”, but named his 2019 solo album Jaime in honor of the sister who taught him piano. Howard also survived the disease, although it left him blind in one eye.
With a group that gave him a place to sell, he played local bars, old people’s houses, shows 90 kilometers away in Birmingham or Nashville, wherever he could be, he finally left after the likes of the Drive-By Truckers and Jack White asked the group to help them. Howard said: “We played to anyone who would listen even if we lost money. “All we wanted was to be in a band and make an album.” We never thought people would fall in love with it like they did. He admits he’s guilty of having a lot of “super talented” people who don’t catch a break. It’s crazy to think they took me out of the millions.
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Today, Shakes still squeezes in experiences like calling President Obama at the White House. “(When) I shook his hand, it felt like it reached the middle of my arm,” smiles Fogg. “Michelle gave us a sincere hug. Each of us has a picture of that moment.” In 2015, Howard performed Come Back with Paul McCartney at his Lollapalooza headline show, trading vocals with the venerable Liverpudlian. “You forget you’re talking to a Beatle. I don’t know where he gets his energy from. The last time I saw him he was at a party at 4 in the morning. I was like: ‘What are you doing here?!’ They just don’t give up.”
It was a boom, and a result: the early 2010s may have been the last time that major labels and small advertising platforms worked to create new stars, and the Shakes – a retro-soul group with a huge fan base – were the beneficiaries. But by 2017, with children born in two of the team’s families, Howard noticed that “when we hit the ground and ran really hard, we were in danger of running the thing down. So he took a break.”
Howard didn’t go quietly, producing the two-time Grammy-nominated Jaime and the acclaimed What Now (2024), and enjoying being able to “mow the lawn, do the gardening, pick up the trash and just do regular jobs”. In 2019, she married singer Jesse Lafser; the marriage lasted one year. “It was too fast,” Howard laments. “Can we go to the next chapter?” We can, but it is very thorny. In 2020, the band’s original drummer, Steve Johnson, received a suspended sentence and probation for violating a domestic violence protection order and was later arrested for felony child abuse. Those cases were dismissed.
The team did it again without him. “I think you can’t go on a long trip like we’ve been without expectations,” Howard says. His reluctance to tell the story fully is as obvious as it sounds. “I put myself in his shoes, I wouldn’t want anyone talking about me.”
Today, Howard says that his experiences have helped him to be calm and patient. He said: “I’ve always struggled with this, but I think about it more than I used to. “I know I can’t change anything in the world.” Not that he doesn’t want to try. Another new song, the jazzily soulful I Feel Hope Coming, works in the same way as American Dream, but with more positivity.
“My thoughts are that I see a lot of angry people, people on the streets defending those who don’t have much against those who have everything,” he says. “But anger leads to protests that get people talking. To me, that’s hope. The American people don’t want war. We want to be able to feed ourselves, clothe our children and their dreams and have the freedom to travel like everybody else. That’s what the songs say.”
In just a few hours, they will present such ideas on the platform. His hope is that songs like the American Dream and I Feel Hope Coming can be heard for a moment: the turning of the tide that he sees happening now as Americans begin to reject hatred and division and turn to freedom, social justice and accountability.
He said: “I look around and see all the people who are not satisfied pointing the finger at the people who are doing it. “Finally people come together and say: ‘I was wrong, let’s do something.'” Fogg agrees: “Hope can be helpful.”
I must be dreaming is released on 28 August on Island Records.
