Almost immediately after Alabama Shakes broke through with tasteful retro-soul style, Brittany Howard pushed back against categorization. Her band’s Grammy-winning 2015 record, Sound & Color, borrowed from touchstones as far-reaching as Y2K post-punk, Erykah Badu, and Portishead, but it was Howard’s 2019 debut solo album, Jaime, where her experimentation truly blossomed. Its sound gravitated between quiet torch songs and raucous declarations that mixed funk-rock with electronica, bound by startling lyrics mined from Howard’s biography. What Now, recorded during the pandemic in Shawn Everett’s studio, is a different beast. Its subject matter is more gestural and existential—a love gone wrong, a call for peace, a bout of depression in the near future. It feels both looser and brawnier, a sound nerd’s project with stadium-sized panache and a grab-bag approach.
What Now opens calmly enough, with crystal singing bowls and a few tentative piano chords and cymbal hits, as Howard narrates her trepidation. “But will I know?/Will I feel it?/The first moment that I see it?” she sings, her voice layered over itself in a blanketing echo. Then, with a whirling synth and explosion of drums, she’s off, blasting through the atmosphere, whizzing past soul, blues, funk, jazz, psychedelia, and house music. If Howard’s lyrics make it seem like she’s still working through things, her music sounds like she’s got it all figured out. Every song here, even the slow stuff, feels giant and propulsive—a grand celestial tour of rock and R&B, guided by one of the few singers and multi-instrumentalists with the range and intuition to pull it off.
Howard is studied in the Stevie Wonder school of pulling a groove out of just about anything, thanks in part to her rhythm section here, drum virtuoso Nate Smith and versatile Alabama Shakes bassist Zac Cockrell. “I Don’t” builds around a melancholy chipmunk-soul hook in the vein of Cam’ron; “Patience” morphs from a bog-standard slow jam into a dazzling showcase of warped keyboard effects; at least one song features Howard banging on a trash can. There’s the muscular, airtight funk-rock of the title track, the frenetic boxed-in percussion of “Red Flags,” and a big swing at house music on “Prove It to You.” Yet some of the album’s most inspired choices have no rhythm at all. Between nearly every track, the singing bowls return, played by sound bath practitioners Ann Sensing and Ramona Reid, providing a brief respite and sealing What Now together like spiritual glue.
Shining like a beacon through it all is Howard’s extraordinary voice. On “Red Flags,” she morphs between staccato chants, defiant snarls, heavenly lilts, a show-stopping falsetto on the chorus—sometimes she’ll do it all at once, thanks to the album’s impeccable multitrack layering. Howard already had the honor of double-soloing with Prince, but she gives him a run for his money on “Power to Undo,” howling and gasping over her own razor-blade guitar licks. The way her voice and the rest of the band build off each other is wondrous in its own right; take “Samson,” where her subdued vocals weave around a trumpet line from Rod McGaha, before she fades out and lets McGaha continue on a solo in the back half. It’s an intricate give-and-take that’s easy to forget during the energized jams, but the unity between Howard and her collaborators drives home the album’s mightiness.
Against its lush acoustics, the songwriting on What Now can feel like an afterthought. Howard constructs narratives that start from an impressionistic fragment of a feeling—uncertainty, indignation, crushing desire—and lets the music take you the rest of the way. Biography is obscured, leaving only the stray “you” and “girl” in songs that feel like letters never to be sent. After the soul-baring of Jaime, where Howard discussed racism and queerness through the lens of personal history, she’s putting more distance between herself and the song. The emotions she describes are no less direct, but their context is elusive.
The most outward-facing themes on What Now come from Maya Angelou, whose adjuring reading of 1995’s “A Brave and Startling Truth” makes up the album’s midpoint interlude. Written for the semicentennial of the United Nations, Angelou’s poem connects the smallness of human life in the universe to an “imperative” for freedom and equality. Howard continues that thread into “Another Day”: “We were born in a time to change the paradigm/Peace is the prize of our timeline,” she declares over punchy, Thundercat-esque bass, becoming a melodic vessel for the poet’s broader message.
But Howard is equally wise to humanity’s smallness, to the effort—and the rest—required to sustain until the imperative can be realized. When What Now finally comes back down to Earth on the beautiful closer “Every Color in Blue,” it’s like a freefall. Methodical guitar and stuttering beats lay the groundwork, Rod McGaha’s trumpet floats up above, and in the middle of looping piano chords, Howard draws out every syllable like she’s letting gravity pull her down: “You don’t see my injury/You don’t see the energy it takes me.” As joyful and effortless as Howard’s work can appear, these songs don’t come for free.
