Alabama Shakes return with I Must Be Dreaming, their first album in a decade

Alabama Shakes have released I Must Be Dreaming, their third album and their first in more than ten years.

Fifteen years have passed since the debut EP that turned a small-town southern band into unlikely stars. That early music was lo-fi and vintage-leaning, and Brittany Howard has spent much of the decade since refusing the retro revivalist label it earned her, first with the band's second album, 2015's Sound + Color, and then with her solo records.

The band that made this one is smaller. Howard, bassist Zack Cockrell and guitarist Heath Fogg are reunited as a three-piece, and Cockrell's melodic bass is mixed so far forward that Rolling Stone's Jonathan Bernstein treats it as close to a lead instrument.

What is on it ranges further than the early records did. "Another Life" is a chamber-soul piece with congas, glockenspiel and a spearing, mostly one-note solo from Howard. "Waist Deep" rests on electric piano from the band's longtime keyboardist Ben Tanner. "American Dream" tells a story of alienation and political unrest through the creeping interplay of bass and guitar. "Garden" sounds like it could have been written before the Second World War, while "Tea Time" reaches into the Afrofuturist territory of Howard's solo work, with "I Feel Hope Coming" at the centre.

Bernstein's verdict is that it is a grown up record, musically and in what it is about, with songs on wistful regret, hard-won hope and the disintegrating state of the country, and that it works as a reintroduction because it shows new sides of the band without giving up what made the first records thrilling.

The album is logged on the release calendar with the rest of the rock and R&B and soul autumn, a season of long-gap returns that also brought Friendly Fires back after seven years and Rayland Baxter's first album in four.