Free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements announces their return with their fifth studio album, Future Present Past, arriving March 27th via Impulse!. The announcement is accompanied by a powerful double single release, “Don’t Lose Your Head” and “Vibrate Higher,” both featuring friend and frequent collaborator MOTHERBOARD. Together, these tracks set the tone for a record that embodies urgency, collective care, and spiritual resistance.
“Don’t lose your head messing with the gods” is the imperative that ignites this new chapter. “Don’t Lose Your Head” unfolds as a rallying cry, grounded in a taut, propulsive arrangement built atop drummer Tcheser Holmes’ agile groove. Vocalist Camae Ayewa and featured guest MOTHERBOARD deliver subdued yet deeply impassioned performances, their voices cutting through the arrangement with clarity and resolve. The track’s disciplined intensity reinforces its message: in times of chaos and imposed disorder, clarity of mind is an act of resistance.
Its counterpart, “Vibrate Higher,” answers in a darker, more brooding register. Originating as a live recording captured before a capacity crowd at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn—on bassist Luke Stewart’s birthday—the piece carries the charged electricity of collective experience. It opens with Keir Neuringer’s atmospheric synth drones, punctuated by Stewart’s expressive bass lines. Gradually, the composition expands into a barrage of percussion and horns, building uneasy density as voices and instruments alike urge the listener to embody the command of its title. At the brink of sonic rupture, Ayewa calls for a “different atmosphere,” and trumpeter Aquiles Navarro responds with dissonant precision, shifting the music as if opening a portal into a hypnotic rhythmic vamp. It is a composed-in-the-moment journey that exemplifies Irreversible Entanglements’ improvisational power—music that doesn’t merely perform but transports.
For Future Present Past, the quintet returned in October 2024 to the legendary Van Gelder Studio, a historic space synonymous with spiritual and avant-garde jazz. There, they recorded most of the album’s main tracks, capturing the immediacy and synergy that define their sound. The record finds the band at the height of its improvisational, compositional, and rhythmic powers, weaving diasporic liberation music into a broader meditation on time and existence: futures brimming with possibility, a present fraught with uncertainty, and a past rich with ancestral wisdom and cautionary memory.
To further develop this expansive vision, additional recording and production unfolded over the next nine months. Producer and engineer Jonathan Schenke collaborated closely with the band in his Brooklyn studio during the summer of 2025, editing and arranging with an ear toward cohesion without sacrificing spontaneity. Andrew Lappin returned to mix the collection, ensuring that the album’s layered intensity remained both immersive and precise. Guests MOTHERBOARD and Helado Negro blend seamlessly into the ensemble’s collective energy, enriching the textural and emotional landscape.
The result is more than an album—it is a call to action. Irreversible Entanglements recognize that no external force will deliver salvation; community, vigilance, and shared responsibility are the only paths forward. The band articulates this ethos in a powerful statement accompanying the record, reflecting on the weight of the present world and the possibility of another that uplifts. They describe themselves as five transforming into billions—billions journeying through existence together, navigating futures of potential, presents filled with anxiety, and pasts that offer both ancestral guidance and warning.
They position this album as “five standing on the shoulders of legions”—honoring healers, alchemists, rebels, and caretakers who have fought and invented new ways of being. In that lineage, Irreversible Entanglements assume their role as messengers, continuing the tradition’s long march toward liberation. “Freedom fighters telling us not to lose our heads amidst imposed chaos,” they write. “It is our duty to vibrate higher, beyond the noise, above the hype, away from the novelty, over the walls, across the borders: to keep going.” In their vision, fight songs are not merely symbolic—they are tools for survival and transcendence.
Future Present Past arrives March 27th via Impulse!, marking another milestone for a collective that has consistently merged avant-garde experimentation with political clarity and communal intention.
Irreversible Entanglements will celebrate the album’s release with a series of live performances, beginning March 26th in Queens, NY at Knockdown Center for a co-release show with Shabaka. They continue with two nights at Solar Myth in Philadelphia on March 27th and 28th, before heading to Europe for appearances at the Torino Jazz Festival in Turin on May 1st, Teatro Massimo in Cagliari on May 2nd, Treibhaus in Innsbruck on May 5th, De Roma in Antwerp on May 6th, and the Jazz à Liège in Liège on May 7th.
With Future Present Past, Irreversible Entanglements once again channel the spirit of collective improvisation into a resonant declaration: amid the turbulence of the now, liberation remains possible if we listen deeply, stand together, and continue to vibrate higher.
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