What Now

For listeners up for an adventure — for an album that reveals itself gradually, continues to surprise after several listens and takes you places you didn’t necessarily know you wanted to go — there are many rewards in store.

What Now is another side of Brittany Howard that makes each of her previous departures feel like a baby step by comparison.

This release has cemented Howard as a must-hear artist as the wonderful sonic collage, soaring vocals, and insightful lyrics all come together winningly.

A Jaime 2.0 likely to secure her status as an auteur in terms of both conception and execution. It's bigger, freer-thinking and more dynamically audacious record. [Feb 2024, p.20]

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.

The individual tracks matter less than the collective experience. Isolated songs may hint at Howard expanded emotional and musical pallette, but What Now is a proper album, where each segment expands and interlocks, providing a whole that's greater than its separate parts.

What Now is sometimes not an easy listen, but it’s certainly a thrilling and restless journey. Looking at how Howard has evolved from her early days with Alabama Shakes, a more appropriate title for this collection could have been What Next – as whatever does come next is likely to be intriguing.

There’s a confidence and vulnerability Brittany Howard fearlessly reveals on this album, which is more adventurous and riskier than Jaime.

Everything from psych-jazz, electro-funk, soulful house and the occasional rocker gets a look in here. In lesser hands it’s a right old mess, but not in Howard’s.

Some might find it a mixed bag due to its atypical diversity, but the songs aren’t too contrasting to be deemed incohesive. Her lyrics are still sharp and impactful, with a little sprinkle of playfulness to fit the dominant genres. The album’s a joyous journey outside the bounds of – and without alienating – the usual, a testament to her considerable, well-rounded talent.

While it may be hard to place genre-wise, it’s not hard to see its quality and sense of ambition.

What Now is no less discursive, plundering so many styles that it might instead be called What Next. But working with co-producer Shawn Everett in a series of top-tier Nashville hubs, Howard makes it cohere not only through the prayer bowls that clang and drone between tracks but also through the way she captures the wild vacillations of falling in and out of something that’s possibly good and potentially terrible. [Mar 2024, p.84]

Sonically sprawling (‘80s guitar sounds are referenced on the title track; a glitchy beat flickers through ‘Another Day’; ‘Power To Undo’ brims with pop-funk chaos) yet also unafraid to find joy in simple pleasures (the most immediate moment comes courtesy of ‘Prove It To You’, a club-ready stomp), ‘WHAT NOW’ is a gem.