‘I Must Be Dreaming’ review: Alabama Shakes hit the snooze button

Alabama Shakes return with “I Must Be Dreaming,” a thoughtful comeback whose hazy production often softens its strongest ideas.

When Alabama Shakes walked away after 2015’s Sound & Color, they left behind a record defined by restless motion. Psychedelic soul giving way to garage rock, falsetto melting into screams, pristine studio detail rubbing against performances that sounded ready to fly apart. Eleven years later, I Must Be Dreaming finds Brittany Howard, Heath Fogg, and Zac Cockrell chasing a quieter revelation. Maybe too quiet.

Throughout most of the album, Howard investigates what happens when love, hope, and even resistance stop requiring pain as proof of their importance. And the music answers back with patient grooves, soft-focus guitars, and songs that often hover rather than erupt. The restraint at play gives Alabama Shakes’ third album an appealing philosophical center. But its gauzy production too often turns inner peace into outright stasis.

Howard, Fogg, and Cockrell reunite here with Sound & Color producer Shawn Everett, whose dense studio treatments push their Southern soul further into psychedelic R&B and dreamlike art rock. Cockrell’s bass frequently supplies the record’s strongest sense of motion, sliding beneath flutes, blurred keyboards, filtered vocals, and Fogg’s smeared guitar figures. While Howard spends more time in a supple falsetto than the volcanic rasp that once dominated the band’s sound.

A humid, mid-tempo space.

The approach suits an album preoccupied with care. “Garden” imagines love as something that needs watering. “Time” treats attention itself as devotion. “Easy” lands on the album’s clearest revelation when Howard sings, “I didn’t know joy could be so quiet.” Yet Everett frequently piles haze around musicians who already create plenty of atmosphere on their own, smoothing their interplay until several songs occupy the same humid, mid-tempo space.

Opener “Tea Time” presents the album’s philosophy in its broadest terms, pairing a wandering bassline and airy flute with Howard’s vision of armies returning home, weapons becoming shelters, and inner fires giving way to flowers. Its refusal to build toward an obvious release suits a song that treats de-escalation as an act of courage, though the arrangement keeps orbiting its mood long after the central idea has said its piece.

“Another Life” fares better because Howard gives the music an emotional contradiction to push against. She tries to turn a breakup into a graceful goodbye while the recurring plea to meet again somewhere else exposes how little closure she’s actually found. “I Feel Hope Coming” brings more muscle through its syncopated low end and clipped guitar accents. Allowing Howard’s call for clean air, fair work, and resistance to manufactured enemies to feel grounded in a groove. Instead of it feeling suspended inside yet another cloud.

Tension, life, or taste?

The album grows strongest whenever its production gives an image room to sharpen. “Time” begins with an almost childlike plea for more hours. And it gradually gathers percussion and guitar until the arrangement itself accelerates beyond Howard’s grasp. “Easy” pares that motion back into warm domestic soul. It lets the line “this love won’t burn me up” gently recast the entire record as a search for forms of intimacy that survive without combustion.

Best of all, “Waist Deep” turns inherited hurt into runoff. Howard compares herself to an angry child standing in a creek while everybody else’s pain flows downhill toward her. Fogg’s fuzzy guitar eventually breaks through the song’s spacious piano arrangement. It’s exactly the kind of textural disruption the rest of the album could use far more often. And it’s here that Alabama Shakes fairly make restraint feel tense and alive. Rather than merely tasteful.

And that’s what ultimately separates I Must Be Dreaming’s richest songs from its softer stretches. “American Dream” reaches for the album’s largest political statement through references to gun reform, environmental collapse, low wages, and bodily autonomy. Yet its languid psychedelic setting blunts lyrics that already state their targets plainly. “How Love’s Supposed to Go” similarly stacks too many metaphors. Breathing, running, light, and overflowing cups and so on. All while the arrangement supplies little friction between them.

The bottom line.

Still, the record carries a subtler argument beneath all those moments. Howard keeps returning to people who’ve learned to recognize struggle more readily than stability. Then asks whether peace can feel meaningful before it starts feeling dull. I Must Be Dreaming certainly makes a compelling case for how joy can be something so subtle, you almost don’t notice it. Alabama Shakes simply suffer too much of this comeback turning down the volume on everything surrounding it.

‘I Must Be Dreaming’ is available now.

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Images courtesy of Island Records.