The way singer Brittany Howard recounts things, most folks in Alabama tend to like both kinds of music: country and western. That makes the out-of-nowhere success of her Athens-based Alabama Shakes seem even more surreal than it should.

“When we first started trying to play around here, nobody wanted to hear us,” Howard says, on the line from the American South’s other Athens. “They weren’t interested. If you weren’t playing Jason Aldean or Garth Brooks, they didn’t care.”

That initial lack of enthusiasm would eventually work in favour of the four-piece, which, sonically speaking, suggests James Brown and Janis Joplin getting it on with the White Stripes at Muscle Shoals. Whenever Alabama Shakes landed a gig, the group went above and beyond to make sure no one walked away disappointed.

“When people would come, we’d try to put on our best show ever, every time,” Howard says. “That was really important, because we never thought in a thousand years that anyone would want to come and see us.”

Consider that confirmation that no one is more surprised at the buzz surrounding Alabama Shakes than, well, Alabama Shakes. Even though the group has yet to release a proper full-length, that hasn’t stopped heavy hitters like Rolling Stone, Billboard, and NME from raving. As a result, despite Alabama Shakes not exactly being a household name in North America, the band’s scheduled-for-April debut, Boys & Girls, is one of the year’s most anticipated albums.

It’s not difficult to pinpoint where the fuss started. After perfecting a blend of throwback soul, fireball country, and garage-friendly punk at gigs around town, Alabama Shakes landed a spot at the 2011 edition of CMJ in New York. The band had no idea what it was getting into.

“It was strange—we didn’t have a concept of what CMJ was, being from here,” Howard relates. “I thought it was just a festival where there was a thousand bands going on, and that we’d go play a set, and then the next band would go on. I was more excited about the boys getting to hang out in New York for the first time. It didn’t seem like any big deal or anything.”

Except that it was, with Alabama Shakes plugging in and levelling an unsuspecting crowd—which happened to include New York Times writer Jon Pareles. Looking back on what would be a huge moment for the group, Howard remembers completely abusing her vocal cords at shows leading up to New York.

“My voice was pretty much gone by the time I got up there,” she says. “It was crazy: as soon as we pulled into the city, I had to go see this vocal coach guy ’cause I had no voice when we arrived at the venue. I was freaking out, like ‘What am I going to do?’ I remember jumping into a cab to this really weird warehouse, gargling some stuff, and then going back and running up on-stage. We sounded really good that night, but it was only after I saw the thing in the New York Times that I realized what we’d done was probably pretty important.”

Floored by Howard’s powerhouse pipes and reportedly mesmerizing stage presence, the Times got the hype machine kicked into high gear. One listen to the Alabama Shakes’ eponymous debut EP, and you get a pretty good idea what all the fuss is about, the band sounding like it’s sweating buckets at the Apollo one minute (the hair-raisingly old-school “I Found You”) and riding guns-a-blazing for punk country the next (“On Your Way”). As accomplished as the band is musically, it’s the bespectacled Howard who comes off as the star of the show; just try not to get chills when she drawls “Bless my heart, bless my soul/Didn’t think I’d make it to 22 years old” in the scruffy straight-from-the-bayou “Hold On”.

The singer and her bandmates might seem like they’ve rocketed out of nowhere, but they aren’t completely new to the business of playing live. Howard was playing in punk outfits at age 13, eventually meeting her future collaborators by hanging out in Athens’s only music shop.

The birth of Alabama Shakes would come when guitarist Heath Fogg, who was playing in a popular cover band at the time, asked Howard, bassist Zac Cockrell, and drummer Steve Johnson to open a show for his group. As part of the deal, he agreed to help out on six-string.

“So we started bashing out the songs that we wanted to do,” Howard says. “I liked that we were all really different. Steve’s a real metal drummer, Zac’s an R & B guy, I used to play in punk banks, and Heath is straight-up Chuck Berry rock ’n’ roll. We had to find something we could all agree on, and that thing was ’60s soul and R & B music. We did that stuff at our first show, but also some of our favourites, like ‘How Many More Times’ by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath’s ‘Fairies Wear Boots’, and AC/DC’s ‘Let There Be Rock’.”

Today, Alabama Shakes is mostly done with covering others, having concocted a formula that somehow manages to sound smartly retro and yet completely in tune with a world where the Black Keys are stadium superstars. In the months to come, watch for the group to make Alabamans realize there’s more to life than Garth Brooks and Jason Aldean. And even more importantly, expect Alabama Shakes to make plenty of converts to its cause as it rips across North America.

“When we did our first show, it was really incredible because people didn’t expect shit from us,” she says. “We’re the weirdest group of kids to get on-stage ever, and people thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is going to suck.’ We did not suck. We got up there and played as hard as we could. Honestly, it’s kind of bleak if you want to be in a band here. But right from the beginning, this has always felt really explosive and important.”

Alabama Shakes plays the Media Club on Sunday (January 29).

Follow Mike Usinger on the Tweeter at twitter.com/mikeusinger.