Last time Alabama Shakes released a new track “Game of Thrones” was still in production, Baker Mayfield was college football’s best player and Jenna Ortega wasn’t old enough to legally purchase cigarettes. In other words it was 2017.
That summer, soul-rock band the Shakes released “Killer Diller Blues,” as part of a PBS documentary “The American Epic Sessions” co-produced by musician Jack White. “Killer Diller Blues,” a cover of Memphis Minnie — a 1940s singer/guitarist best known for her posthumously Led Zeppelin-famed song “When the Levee Breaks” — won Alabama Shakes their fourth Grammy in nine nominations.
Eight years later, Alabama Shakes have dropped a new track, “Another Life.” It’s actually the band’s first original song since Grammy-winning 2015 album “Sound & Color,” which boasted the singles “Don’t Wanna Fight,” “Gimme All Your Love” and “Future People.”
Sonically, “Another Life” evokes the prismatic R&B of “Sound & Color.” The song finds Shakes singer/guitarist Brittany Howard cooing in a Curtis Mayfield style falsetto. In a new interview with NPR, Howard says of the new song, “It reminds me of the Guess Who, or even early Tom Jones. It’s something that I was really excited by: Orchestrated ’60s guitar rock.”
In a statement to Pitchfork, Howard details the song’s lyrical themes: “When I wrote ‘Another Life,’ I was thinking about all the lives we carry. The ones we’re living right now, the ones that slipped away because of different choices, the what ifs, the what wasn’t meant to be, the goodbyes, and the chance encounters that feel divine.
“This song is about those threads and how they stretch across time and space, connecting every version of who we are. It’s about letting them come together, letting them harmonize, and realizing that goodbye isn’t really goodbye. It’s more like I’ll see you later. A collective story that never stops unfolding. I’m glad we opened this door into this reality of us making music together again.”
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Summer 2025 also marked the first Alabama Shakes live shows in eight years. Howard, who embarked on an acclaimed solo career in 2019, and bassist Zac Cockrell, who’d been part of Howard’s solo band, reconnected with Shakes guitarist Heath Fogg for a reunion tour of amphitheaters.
But the tour’s a “three-union” not a true reunion. The Shakes’ original drummer Steve Johnson was left out of the lucrative tour, telling AL.com he’d been ousted from the band due to legal issues he had during the band’s hiatus.
No word yet on who plays drums on new song “Another Life.” But Nashville percussionist Lewis Wright has been behind the kit on the current Shakes tour. Longtime Shakes auxiliary musician Ben Tanner is back on keyboards for the band.
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Alabama Shakes released just two albums during their original run, “Sound & Color” and 2012 debut “Boys & Girls.” The debut produced the band’s signature song “Hold On,” which remains their most streamed song on Spotify. The band’s second most streamed song in “Always Alright,” from the soundtrack of 2012 Jennifer Lawrence/Bradley Cooper film “Silver Linings Playbook.”
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There’s good news for Shakes fans on the album front, too. Howard, Fogg and Cockrell are working on a new album. Howard tells NPR, “I feel like there may be a few songs that group similarly together, like, they sound like they belong in the same world. But for the most part, we just did whatever we wanted to. There’s some stuff that reminds me of garage Sly Stone. And there’s some things that I don’t know exactly what genre it would be. It’s just experimentation.”
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