Into The Music
Alabama Shakes walked off stage at the end of the 2016 touring cycle and went silent for nearly a decade. Not the carefully managed kind of silence that comes with a press release, just gone. Brittany Howard made a solo record, Jaime, in 2019, one of the best albums of that year. Then she made What Now in 2024. The band’s absence was, for a long time, easy to forget because Howard was still doing interesting things. Then “Another Life” arrived last year, the first Alabama Shakes original in ten years, and reminded everyone what that band specifically sounds like when it is functioning.
Now they are back in full. “American Dream” dropped this week as the second new track since the reunion, and it is a protest song in the most direct sense: guns, abortion rights, climate, wages, the general texture of a country in the process of losing the plot. Howard described it as “a snapshot of what we’re living through in 2026,” and the song earns that description without flinching. It is the kind of political music that does not hedge. There is no both-sides cushioning. She is looking at something specific and naming it.
Alabama Shakes formed in Athens, Alabama, in 2009, built around the combustion of Howard’s voice and a blues-rock foundation that managed to feel both completely traditional and completely irreducible. Boys and Girls arrived in 2012 and placed the band in a particular company: bands that make American roots music sound necessary again rather than nostalgic. Sound and Color in 2015 expanded that palette considerably, bringing in funk, soul, and art-rock elements without losing the core tension that makes the band work. That record won Grammys. It also made some people nervous, which is usually a sign that something real was happening.
Howard, Zac Cockrell, and Heath Fogg are the trio that kept the project alive through the long pause and now through its return. What the reunion has offered, in its two songs so far, is a band that sounds like it has been thinking rather than just resting. The political directness of “American Dream” was not in the original Alabama Shakes DNA. Sound and Color hinted at it. The years in between, in which Howard was clearly paying attention to the world, seem to have sharpened it.
A North American tour begins next week, running through mid-June, followed by European dates in July. The setlist is not yet known. What is known is that they are bringing the full band, not the solo show, and that the energy around these dates feels different from the usual nostalgia-circuit reunion. There is new music. There is new intent.
Whether there will be a new album is not confirmed. What is confirmed is that Alabama Shakes, in their second act, seem less interested in consolidating what made them loved the first time and more interested in figuring out what they have to say now. “American Dream” is not a comfortable song. It is not designed to make anyone feel good about where things stand. That choice, in 2026, takes something.