Brittany Howard — the vocal powerhouse at the center of Alabama Shakes — builds a towering and mystical effigy to love burning hope on her new solo album, What Now. She will also take the stage later this year at both weekends of Coachella 2024 and embark on a headlining tour that will bring her to Humphrey’s Concerts by the Bay in San Diego on April 20th. Like her debut, Jamie, the record is a grandiose lesson in eviscerating and soul-gripping songwriting, though this time, she pairs her poetic yowls with lushly intricate melodies.
What Now opens with “Earth Sign,” a radiant crescendo of loving affirmation that blooms into existence with ecstatic power, not unlike the field of golden poppies that adorn its cover. The song’s lofty rhythms and soaring drums are an emotional and spiritual motif across the album. Howard rises, wreathed with unapologetic jubilance, to forage the fruits of love’s necessity from a chaotic world.
“With the world we’re living in now, it feels like we’re all just trying to hang onto our souls,” Howard reflected. “Everything seems to be getting more extreme and everyone keeps wondering, ‘What now? What’s next?’ By the same coin, the only constant on this record is you never know what’s going to happen next: every song is its own aquarium, its own little miniature world built around whatever I was feeling and thinking at the time.”
On the blues-soaked resonance of “I Don’t,” she cradles a tender reminder of the warmth that’s been wrung from our lives. “Does anyone even care / That we don’t smile with our eyes anymore?” Howard asks with lambent earnestness. Meanwhile, the daydream soul that spills from “To Be Still” unfolds as a bass-roiling meditation on loving desire. “You could plant me in the sun or in the shade / I’d spend all my days reaching towards your rays,” she gushes over the song’s groovy allure. “For love I’d never have to hunger.”
However, she also remains cautious about losing herself in such affection — “I don’t wanna confuse u for fulfillment / I don’t want to wonder what our love is” Howard barks on the album’s fiercely funky title track “What Now” — fully aware of the manipulative tension and personal woe that comes with it. Yet the album’s back half, announced by the spellbinding spoken word “Interlude,” finds her enveloping the world in her championing of “peacemaking.”
The drumming kineticism of “Another Day” effuses a rallying idealism as Howard enlists you in her march toward empathy. Then there are the spiraling disco fusions that spark and crystallize on “Prove It To You,” lending the shock of a hypnotic dance track to the album’s genre wayfarings, while the euphoric reckonings that burst from “Power To Undo” sizzle with liberating self-love.
As the album reaches its close, “Every Color In Blue” materializes as its gloaming, bittersweet outro. Over a tumble of keys, rapid percussion, and mournful horns, Howard lets fly her rapt cries toward a distant horizon: “It becomes me, overcomes me / Dopamine leaves takes me / Eviscerates me, too raw / Tuned out, I can’t believe I’m all out of rainbows.”
Her words bear the weight of that raw but smoldering truth of love’s daunting enormity and visceral bliss. And like a beatific exhale, What Now ends on an emotionally nebulous but profound note that grows more refulgent with every listen.
“This record’s definitely meant to be listened to alone so you can really meditate with it,” Howard explained. “At the end of the day I hope people use the album however they need to, but I do think the gift I bring is to help people to be more introspective and ask themselves questions. And I think with a little self-examination, we can learn to be kinder, more compassionate, more understanding of each other. We can see that a lot of us are going through the same shit, and we all just want to be seen for who we really are.”
ARTISTS YOU SHOULD KNOW
BEST NEW MUSIC
Words: Steven Ward
What Now is currently available on all streaming platforms. See Brittany Howard at Coachella 2024 and Humphrey’s Concerts by the Bay in San Diego on April 20th.
Visit Brittany Howard on her website, TikTok, and Instagram to stay updated on new releases and tour announcements.
Brittany Howard tour
Listen to What Now the new album from Brittany Howard below!
Brittany Howard
What Now
Island Records
February 9th, 2024
1. Earth Sign
2. I Don’t
3. What Now
4. Red Flags
5. To Be Still
6. Interlude
7. Another Day
8. Prove It To You
9. Samson
10. Patience
11. Power To Undo
12. Every Color In Blue
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