Alabama Shakes Come Back With a Sound Makeover, and Shawn Everett Is the Star

In the winter of 1914, along stretches of the Western Front, soldiers climbed out of their trenches, swapped cigarettes and sang carols. For a few hours they forgot they were supposed to be killing each other. Brittany Howard says that Christmas truce was on her mind when she wrote "Tea Time," the opening song on Alabama Shakes' first album in eleven years. It's a prayer for peace and ordinary happiness. But the message isn't what grabs you first. The sound is. Flute drifts in over muffled, shuffling drums that slowly begin to boom and echo. A boom-bap pulse sits under a guitar with an Afrobeat lilt, and Zac Cockrell's bass keeps shifting the ground beneath it all. Every few bars something moves in the mix that you didn't see coming. Within four minutes it's clear who the star of I Must Be Dreaming is: the man at the controls.

That man is Shawn Everett. The last time he worked with the Shakes, on Sound & Color, he and mastering engineer Bob Ludwig won the Grammy for Best Engineered Album. Since then his client list has read like a who's who of the decade's most adventurous-sounding records: the War on Drugs' A Deeper Understanding, Kacey Musgraves' Golden Hour, Beck's Hyperspace (which won him another engineering Grammy), Perfume Genius, Julian Casablancas + the Voidz, Adele's 30 and Howard's own solo debut, Jaime. He's the kind of engineer who asks artists to send him a picture of what they want a song to sound like, and who'll run a track through a smartphone if that gets him somewhere new. Here, co-producing with the band at Sound Emporium and Blackbird in Nashville, he gives Alabama Shakes a full sound makeover.

They needed one, because this band nearly didn't come back. The Shakes came out of Athens, Alabama, with Boys & Girls in 2012, a garage-soul debut that made "Hold On" sound like a lost single from 1968. Sound & Color went to Number One on the Billboard 200 in 2015. Then came burnout, a hiatus, two acclaimed Howard solo albums, and in 2021 the dismissal of drummer Steve Johnson. The reunion happened almost by accident. In December 2024 a friend asked Howard to play a benefit in Tuscaloosa for a struggling brewery that had supported the band in its early days. She brought guitarist Heath Fogg and bassist Cockrell on stage for a surprise set. The plan became an EP to mark ten years of Sound & Color, and then the songs kept coming. The Shakes are now a trio, with Noah Bond and Lewis Wright sharing the drum stool.

The songs don't reinvent anything. The sound does.

What strikes me most is how modern it all sounds. The first two albums wore their vintage proudly. This one doesn't, and I'm not the only one hearing it. Critics have pointed to disco drums, post-punk guitars and hip-hop beats, and several credit Everett directly for the shift. Flute, harpsichord, sitar and vibraphone could easily have added up to Sixties psych pastiche. Everett places them in a space that sounds unmistakably like now: close and intimate one moment, wide open the next, never cluttered, always surprising.

Much has been written about Howard singing more softly here, leaning on falsetto and holding back. Listen to "Another Life" before you believe it. It's a chamber-soul epic about the lives we didn't get to live, and Howard sings it with anything but restraint. The voice that tore through "Hold On" is fully intact. The difference is that she now picks her moments.

"Garden" is one of the loveliest things here: vibraphone, a vocal so close you can almost feel it, and Cockrell himself behind the drum kit. It's also where the album shows its roots most openly. You can draw a straight line from it to Allen Stone's self-titled album, the record that made Stone a soul revelation some fifteen years ago. Both have the same warmth, the same social conscience and the same open love for classic Seventies soul.

Then there are the politics. "American Dream" takes on low wages and guns, and "I Feel Hope Coming" puts its faith in a generation that won't swallow the lies. Some critics say this music is too smooth to hit hard. But Marvin Gaye proved in 1971 that silk can carry a protest song just as well as sandpaper.

Silk can carry a protest song just as well as sandpaper.

So why not five stars? Paul Gauguin is said to have claimed that in art you're either a revolutionary or a plagiarist. Alabama Shakes are neither, and that's both the charm and the limit of this record. Strip away Everett's mix and what's left is a set of beautifully written, superbly played soul songs that sit comfortably in a tradition we already know, from Gaye and Curtis Mayfield to Stone and Howard's own solo work. The songs don't reinvent anything. The sound does.

Closer "Tied to You," which Howard herself calls a "psychedelic Sade," ends the album in a warm haze. Eleven years ago Alabama Shakes sounded like the past. Now they sound like the present, and it took the right man at the desk to get them there.