By Scott McLennan

Future Soul is an exercise in creating maximum accessibility without reducing the band’s extraordinary musicianship.

Future Soul, The Tedeschi Trucks Band

The album cover of Future Soul

After using a 12th-century Persian epic about unattainable love as the inspiration for its 2022 album I Am the Moon, the Tedeschi Trucks Band turns its gaze toward the future in its new record. And the divergence in direction does not stop there.

Future Soul, TTB’s sixth studio release, is the band’s most straight-ahead rock album to date. The songs are tight and focused. The production emphasizes economy –no small feat for a 12-piece band that features virtuosos in every seat. Future Soul is an exercise in creating maximum accessibility without reducing the band’s extraordinary musicianship.

Singer and guitarist Susan Tedeschi and guitarist Derek Trucks – the married co-founders and leaders of the band – take center stage on this outing. Their superheroic image on the album’s comic-book-style cover makes that clear.

That means that keyboard player Gabe Dixon, bass player Brandon Boone, drummers Tyler Greenwell and Isaac Eady, sax player Kebbi Williams, trombone player Elizabeth Lea, trumpet player Emmanuel Echem, and singers Alecia Chakour and Mark Rivers are almost always performing in ensemble mode around Tedeschi and Trucks. Singer Mike Mattison, who began working with Trucks in the early 2000s before TTB formed in 2010, is given a lead vocal spot on “Under the Knife,” The songwriting duties are shared among Mattison, Trucks, Tedeschi, Dixon, and Greenwell. The ensemble may be scaled back in terms of the longer jams, but the proceedings are musically expansive. In assembling this album, TTB pulled in influences from country to blues to funk to grunge. And, for the first time, the band worked with an outside producer: Mike Elizondo, whose earliest successes came in collaborating with Dr. Dre and Eminem.

The elemental TTB sound is intact, so much so that in spots Future Soul feels like a lure for people who have been missing out on this band’s work for the past 16 years — it offers another way into this group’s beautifully crafted and dynamic sound.

Trucks’s solo on the euphoric “I Got You” recalls his performance on “Blue Sky” from the Allman Brothers Band, a group the guitarist joined in 1999 when he was just 19 years old and helped lead to a late-career renaissance and that he continues to honor in concert with the TTB.

The silky “Who Am I” echoes the TTB classic “Midnight in Harlem” from the group’s debut album Revelator. And the loping “Shout Out” bears more than a passing resemblance to “Ball and Chain,” also on the group’s first album.

The Tedeschi Trucks Band. Photo: Chapman Baehler

In fact, you could look at Future Soul as Revelator after plenty of road miles. Both are records steeped in a variety of musical styles anchored in a singular voice. Half of the musicians on Future Soul also played on Revelator, and half have joined the TTB journey as it has evolved. This blend of history and evolution helps define Future Soul, giving the album its depth through what is a pretty concise, to-the-point, project.

Tedeschi’s vocal performance on the album provides a solid through-line, from the funked-up opener “Crazy Cryin’” to the countrypolitan ramble of “Ride On” at its close. In between, she skillfully navigates the blitz and fuzz of Trucks’s amped-up guitar work on the title track and shares space with the brooding, grungy tone on “Hero.”

“Be Kind” conjures a poppy Southern soul sound. It offers an inviting brand of retro, while the song’s pleading lyrics — aimed at a wayward partner — deliver an uncomfortable brand of retro.

“Devil Be Gone” is a straight-up blues shuffle that showcases the tangled guitar interplay that, in part, make TTB such an exciting live act.

Mattison’s playful “Under the Knife” and the acoustic ballad “What in the World” round out the record’s jukebox menu.

The business side of the TTB team most likely sees Future Soul as a potential second-act breakthrough a la Bonnie Raitt’s Nick of Time or Steve Winwood’s Back in the High Life. Though it may shake out that Future Soul becomes more of a transitional record that takes stock and resets the band, in the vein of the Grateful Dead’s Aoxomoxoa or Led Zeppelin’s III.

Future Soul comes out March 20 as the Tedeschi Trucks Band is in the midst of its annual residency at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. TTB will be performing locally on Sept. 2 at Tanglewood in Lenox and Sept. 6 at BankNH Pavilion in Gilford, N.H.

Scott McLennan covered music for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette from 1993 to 2008. He then contributed music reviews and features to The Boston Globe, Providence Journal, Portland Press Herald, and WGBH, as well as to The Arts Fuse. He also operated the NE Metal blog to provide in-depth coverage of the region’s heavy metal scene.