In the autumn of 2024, Alabama Shakes showed no sign of ending their indefinite hiatus – and nobody was asking them to. Seven years had passed since the blues-soul-rock band, who exploded out of Athens, Alabama in 2009, had last shared a stage. Their transatlantic Top 10 2012 debut Boys & Girls announced them; the million-selling 2015 follow-up Sound & Color went to No 1 in the US and won them four Grammys. Their fanbase included Bruce Springsteen, Robert Plant and Barack Obama. But by 2017 they were physically and creatively spent, and they stopped. Then, in December 2024, with almost no warning, they played their first show in more than seven years.

“We had a friend in Tuscaloosa who had a brewery, but it wasn’t doing so well after Covid,” explains singer Brittany Howard. “He called me and said he was going to do a fundraiser and asked if I’d like to perform. I said, ‘For sure.’” But then she started reminiscing, remembering how that particular friend had been a huge help to the band, not just her personally. She felt the band owed him something, collectively. “So I called the fellas,” she smiles. “‘Do y’all wanna perform at this thing – like, all of us, together?’ And they instantly said yes.”

Soon afterwards, they found themselves rehearsing songs they hadn’t played in years. Then, on 18 December 2024, they performed at the 1,000-capacity Bama Theatre, to a rapturous reception. Guitarist Heath Fogg remembers that show well. “It felt like an out-of-body experience, to me,” he says. “Just really happy, really thankful … a feeling of euphoria in the purest form. I hadn’t played those songs since our last gig. I hadn’t even listened to them unless one came on in a restaurant or something. Then at the show we knew so many people in the crowd but we hadn’t told anyone we were playing. So it was a total surprise – and so exciting.”

Howard knew that it couldn’t stop there. “It felt very natural to think: ‘Let’s get together again. Let’s rehearse. Let’s write songs. Let’s go on tour,’” she says. “I naively thought we’d do some shows in clubs and theatres, but we’ve been playing some of the biggest shows we’ve ever played, which is just baffling to me, but wonderful.”

Part of the answer is a song. Released in April this year, American Dream – a gospel-tinged snapshot of a country coming apart and refusing to despair about it – went viral on TikTok and Instagram. Over the next fortnight, Howard found herself back at the centre of the cultural conversation after a decade of highly acclaimed but less impactful solo work. Describing lyrics – which address gun violence, the climate crisis, abortion rights, low wages and even Trump’s White House renovations – as “a snapshot of 2026”, the singer spoke of her desire that future generations would hear it and think: “‘Yeah, shit was crazy back then, but we made it through.’”

The song’s success is all the more remarkable given the dire state of protest music in 2026. With honourable exceptions such as Bruce Springsteen’s Streets of Minneapolis, a powerful response to the Ice killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, or Lucinda Williams’s gently raging The World’s Gone Wrong, most attempts to tackle the ruinous state of Trump’s US fall short, either because they are banal or too divisive, failing to identify the rot in a way that resonates on both sides of the divide. Overnight, though, Alabama Shakes rediscovered their cultural lane – a band almost uniquely capable of being furious and hopeful in the same breath, articulating the feelings of millions of people. As Howard puts it, “We’ve probably touched on these subjects before, but not to the extent that we are now.”

We meet in Leeds, the day before they play the city’s cavernous Millennium Square – their first gig in Europe for a decade. Howard, who the following night will take the stage in a striking glittering furry ballgown, is dressed down and very jetlagged. Fogg is too, but has been out exploring the city, where they have never played before, and is endearingly excited about having visited Leeds’s oldest ale house, Whitelock’s. “Built in 1715!” he exclaims, in a lovely soft Alabama drawl. Bassist Zac Cockrell doesn’t join us, and is possibly still sleeping.

Alongside old favourites such as Hold On – 225m Spotify streams and counting – the gig will unveil songs from their fabulous forthcoming third album, I Must Be Dreaming, a radical departure from their previous big-lunged retro soul. It’s more ethereal, even psychedelic in places, with songs about relationships, the current state of their home country and the pace and dissonance of modern life.

“I feel there’s quite a difference between the first album and the second,” Howard says, “but there’s a thread between them and I feel the same about this album. We’re 10 years older and more experienced, but going to unpredictable places has always been the fun part of this group.” Dreamlike opener Tea Time is built round, of all things, flutes. The similarly titled Time has a full-on psychedelic jam. The album’s first single, Another Life, morphs from R&B into hazy, frazzled rock and packs a huge, euphoric chorus: “Can we try again? Can we try in another life?”

“It’s a way of saying: ‘This relationship has run ashore,’” Howard says, “‘but maybe in the next life it will all work out. I bid you adieu, but just for now.’”

Is the song, on some level, even subconsciously, partly about the band? “Maybe, when I think about it, because it is unusual to come back like this,” she considers. “Cos it feels good and honest. I’m not being forced to do this. When we started the group it felt like it was cool to make music with your friends: ‘What kind of music do you like? How are we going to fit together?’ Coming back together was the same: ‘What are you into now? What have you been listening to?’”

The trio went to the same high school, but didn’t really know each other. Then Howard noticed Cockrell’s At the Drive-In T-shirt and thought he might like the music she’d been making and want to play together. “I approached him in class and played him a CD in his Honda Civic, which was a very vulnerable thing to do,” she remembers. “He was smashing through the tracks and I was thinking, ‘Uh oh, he’s not liking this.’ But then he went, ‘This is cool. Let’s do it.’” Fogg, three years above them, had left college when he came onboard, and the three bonded over rock, punk, R&B and old music they’d picked up from their parents: Dionne Warwick, Elvis, Motown.

Howard can pour her heart out like a classic, old-school soul singer, but she started as a drummer, gravitating to other instruments through necessity and only realising she had a voice when her mother heard her tape and said: “I didn’t know you could sing.” She describes her childhood in Limestone County as “slow-paced”, among “pastures, little birds and wildfires. Everybody knew each other. You had some kids who rode horses or drove tractors to school, and people grew soya beans, so we played in fields of yellow.” Not that she lacked harder life experience for songs. Howard is gay, mixed-race – her white mother and Black father separated when she was eight after her 13-year-old sister Jaime died from retinoblastoma. The singer has previously said that the incident triggered “a raincloud over our family”, but named her 2019 solo album Jaime to honour the sister who taught her piano. Howard herself survived the disease, although it left her partly blind in one eye.

With the band giving her an outlet, they played local bars, old folk’s homes, shows a 90-mile drive away in Birmingham or Nashville, anywhere that would have them, eventually taking off after the likes of Drive-By Truckers and Jack White asked the band to support them. “We’d play to anyone who would listen even if we lost money,” says Howard. “All we wanted was to be in a band and make an album. We never thought people would fall in love with it like they did.” She admits to some guilt about the multitudes of “super-talented” people who never get a break. “It’s crazy to think I was plucked from millions. So many people don’t get to have a voice.”

Today, the Shakes still pinch themselves at experiences such as performing for President Obama at the White House. “[When] I shook his hand, it felt like it reached the middle of my arm,” smiles Fogg. “Michelle gave us a great, sincere hug. Each of us have a photo of that moment.” In 2015, Howard performed Get Back with Paul McCartney during his headline set at Lollapalooza, trading vocals with the revered Liverpudlian. “You forget you’re talking to a Beatle. I don’t know where he gets his energy from. The last time I saw him was at an after-party at 4am. I was like: ‘What are you doing here?!’ He just doesn’t stop.”

It was a heady rise, and a product of its moment: the early 2010s were perhaps the last period in which a major label and the young streaming platforms worked in concert to mint new stars, and the Shakes – a retro-soul band with a colossal playlist-friendly single – were obvious beneficiaries. But by 2017, with babies due in two of the band’s households, Howard felt that after “hitting the ground running and running very hard, we were in danger of running the thing into the ground. Stopping must have looked crazy from the outside, but this group’s always been about protecting and caring about each other.” So they took a break.

Howard didn’t exactly go quietly, making the twice Grammy-nominated Jaime and the acclaimed What Now (2024), but also relishing being able to “cut the grass, do the garden, scoop the litter box and just do normal tasks”. In 2019, she married musician Jesse Lafser; the marriage lasted barely a year. “It was very quick,” Howard grins. “Can we go to the next topic?” We can, but it’s even thornier. In 2020, the band’s original drummer, Steve Johnson, received a suspended sentence and probation for violating a domestic violence protection order and was later arrested over wilful abuse of a child. Those charges were dropped.

The band re-formed without him. “I guess you can’t take a long journey like we have without expecting some things to happen,” Howard says. Her reluctance to fully address the subject is as obvious as it is understandable. “I put myself in his shoes, I wouldn’t want someone out there talking about me.”

Today, Howard says that her experiences have made her a gentler, more patient person. “I’ve always had that fight in me, but I’m a bit more contemplative than I was,” she says. “I know I can’t change everything in the world.” Not that she doesn’t want to try. Another new song, the jazzily soulful I Feel Hope Coming, works the same seam as American Dream, but with even more positivity.

“My perspective is that I see a lot of people outraged, people in the streets protecting those who don’t have very much from those who have everything,” she says. “But outrage leads to protest which leads to people talking to each other. To me, that’s hopeful. The American people don’t want war. We want to be able to feed ourselves, clothe our kids and dream dreams for them and have freedom of movement like anybody else. That’s what those songs are about.”

In a few hours’ time, she’ll express such sentiments on stage. Her hope is that songs such as American Dream and I Feel Hope Coming can soundtrack a moment: the turning of the tide she sees happening now as Americans start to reject hate and division and turn towards freedoms, social justice and accountability.

“I look around and see all these people who were dissatisfied finally pointing the finger at people who are making it that way,” she says. “People finally coming together and saying: ‘I was wrong. Let’s do something about it.’” Fogg concurs: “Hope can be a catalyst. First we hope, then we make it happen.”

I Must Be Dreaming is released on 28 August on Island Records.

Ribs kissed by hickory smoke, tender pulled pork and a sauce recipe passed down for generations have helped Archibald & Woodrow’s Barbeque become one of Alabama’s most celebrated barbeque destinations.

Tasting Table named the family-run restaurant the best barbecue spot in the state.

Here’s what to know about the Alabama restaurant worth adding to your must-try list.

Best barbecue in Alabama

Since Archibald & Woodrow’s Barbeque opened its doors in 1962, three generations have carried on the tradition of slow-cooked barbecue, turning a small mom-and-pop operation into a nationally recognized name.

Tasting Table says that while Alabama is known for its white Alabama BBQ sauce, there’s no sauce required for the pork ribs served up at Archibald’s.

Archibald’s has gained attention from Good Morning America, Southern Living and The New York Times.

What’s on the menu? 

The restaurant’s menu centers on classic Alabama barbecue, with hickory-smoked ribs and pulled pork leading the way.