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\n\tIt\u2019s been fifteen years since Alabama Shakes<\/a> released their debut EP,<\/a> which catapulted the small-town southern band into an unlikely few years of stardom. The group\u2019s early music was lo-fi, vintage-leaning, and just twee enough to make the scrappy garage rockers an emblem of early-mid aughts Urban Outfitters hipsterdom. Brittany Howard<\/a>, the band\u2019s lead singer and charismatic frontwoman, has spent much of the past decade refuting that notion. With the band\u2019s daring second album, 2015\u2019s Sound + Color<\/em><\/a>, and her subsequent solo records, Howard has established herself less like the retro revivalist her band were pegged as and more as a Prince-like figure: mercurial, continually searching, and uninterested in conventional genre.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tNow Howard has returned to the band that jumpstarted her career. What better way to exemplify her ongoing artistic metamorphosis than to apply that ethos to the band most people still associate with \u201cHold On.<\/a>\u201d I Must Be Dreaming<\/em>, Alabama Shakes\u2019 third record \u2014 and their first in more than a decade \u2014 is a surprising and welcome reintroduction that shows off entirely new sides of the upstart group without ever abandoning what made their early records so thrilling. It is, among other things, a grown up record, both musically and narratively: There are songs about wistful regret and hard-won hope, songs about the disintegrating state of the country, songs about, well, watering gardens. Some songs (\u201cGarden\u201d) sound like they could have been written before World War II. Others (\u201cTea Time\u201d) feel like astral projections from the Afrofuturistic landscape Howard has been exploring in her solo career.<\/p>\n \n\tReunited as a three-piece, Howard, bassist Zack Cockrell and guitarist Heath Fogg sound reinvigorated. \u201cAnother Life\u201d is a chamber-soul epic that features an acrobatic, emotive Howard vocal performance, subtle bass playing from Cockrell alongside congas and glockenspiel, and a spearing, mostly one-note solo from Howard. It sounds both nothing the band has ever done before, and like something you would have hoped they would\u2019ve eventually arrived at had they kept making records right after Sound + Color<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n