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Alabama Shakes Announce New Album I Must Be Dreaming

A decade after Sound and Color, the band is back with eleven songs, a Grammy-winning producer's chair filled by Shawn Everett, and a sitar.

Brittany Howard has a way of describing things that makes you want to hear them immediately. She calls the title of Alabama Shakes' new album, I Must Be Dreaming, a way of holding the world's chaos and beauty at the same time. That's not the language of a band easing back into business as usual. It's the language of a band that stepped away and came back with something they needed to say. Alabama Shakes will release I Must Be Dreaming on August 28, 2026, through Island Records — their third studio album, and their first in more than ten years.

The gap is the headline, but the arithmetic underneath it is what makes this interesting. Sound and Color came out in 2015 and won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album. Then, silence — at least on the album front — until the band reunited in late 2024 and started writing again. I Must Be Dreaming carries eleven tracks, two of which listeners already have in hand: Another Life and American Dream, both released as singles ahead of the record. Whatever this album is, it's been arriving in pieces for a while now.

## What "I Feel Hope Coming" Actually Signals

The newest piece landed on July 10, 2026, when the band announced I Feel Hope Coming as the album's next single. Howard has framed it as a statement of faith in a younger generation and a refusal to give up — not vague optimism, but something pointed at people and moment. Heath Fogg's read is a little different and just as telling: he's described the song as coming out of a joyful collaboration, and as representative of what he values about the band being back together. Two members, two angles on the same song — hope as conviction from one, hope as the feeling of the room from the other. That's a useful preview of what this album might be arguing with itself about.

The instrumentation backs up the idea that this isn't a straightforward return to the Boys & Girls playbook. Flute, harpsichord, and sitar all show up in the album's arrangements alongside layered vocals — textures that don't belong to any single Alabama Shakes era so much as they suggest the band widening its own vocabulary. Sessions took place at Sound Emporium Studios and Blackbird Studio in Nashville, with the band co-producing alongside Shawn Everett, who has spent the last decade working at the edges of rock records that still want to sound like bands playing in a room together.

## Ten Years Is a Long Time to Sit on a Grammy

That's the tension worth sitting with: a band returning after a decade doesn't get to treat the intervening years as blank space. Sound and Color's Grammy win is still the last major data point anyone has on this group, and I Must Be Dreaming is the first real chance to see what they've become since. The reunion itself dates back only to late 2024, which means this album has been built, not stockpiled — it's the product of a relatively compressed writing and recording window following years apart, not a decade of quiet accumulation.

The rollout has the shape of a band treating this seriously rather than nostalgically. There's an official album trailer, a pre-order and pre-save page already live, and a North American and European tour that runs through September — enough distance for I Must Be Dreaming to have already found its live setting before most people have heard the whole thing. Two singles are out, a third is coming, and the record itself is barely three weeks away as of its announcement.

What's actually confirmed here is narrower than the mythology around "the return of Alabama Shakes," and that's worth holding onto. We know the date, the track count, the studios, the producer, a clutch of unusual instruments, and two competing but complementary accounts of what the lead single means to the people who made it. Everything else — how eleven songs cohere, whether the sitar and harpsichord are texture or architecture, what a full decade of distance sounds like compressed into forty-some minutes — is still an open question. That's precisely the kind of question a comeback record is supposed to leave you asking.

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