Free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements return with Future Present Past, their fifth studio album and a powerful continuation of the group's ongoing exploration of improvisation, liberation and collective expression. Released via Impulse!, the album is introduced with two new singles, “Don’t Lose Your Head” and “Vibrate Higher,” both featuring longtime friend and frequent collaborator MOTHERBOARD.
The two tracks offer contrasting windows into the musical world of the new album. “Don’t Lose Your Head” arrives as a restrained but intensely focused rallying cry. Vocalists Camae Ayewa and MOTHERBOARD deliver the song with a subdued passion, riding an agile groove from drummer Tcheser Holmes. The arrangement remains tight and purposeful, creating a sense of urgency without sacrificing the space that has always been essential to Irreversible Entanglements' music.
“Vibrate Higher” takes a more expansive and unsettled approach. The track originated as a live performance recorded before a capacity crowd at Brooklyn's Pioneer Works, on bassist Luke Stewart's birthday. It begins with atmospheric synth drones from Keir Neuringer, joined by Stewart's expressive bass, before gradually building into a dense combination of percussion, horns and voices.
As the intensity increases, Ayewa calls for a “different atmosphere,” triggering a dramatic transformation. Trumpeter Aquiles Navarro introduces dissonant lines that seem to open a passage into another musical space, leading the ensemble into an entrancing rhythmic vamp. The transition captures one of Irreversible Entanglements' greatest strengths: the ability to make composition and improvisation feel inseparable, creating music that seems to discover itself in real time.
That quality runs throughout Future Present Past. For the album, the quintet returned to the historic Van Gelder Studio in October 2024 to record most of the primary tracks. The sessions captured the group at an especially mature point in its development, combining group improvisation, composition and rhythm into a sound that draws deeply from diasporic liberation music.
The album's title reflects its broad perspective. The past is treated as a source of ancestral knowledge and historical warnings; the present is marked by uncertainty and anxiety; and the future remains a place of possibility and potential. Rather than viewing those three dimensions separately, Irreversible Entanglements weave them together into a musical continuum.
Additional recording and production continued for nine months after the Van Gelder sessions. In the summer of 2025, Jonathan Schenke worked closely with the band at his Brooklyn studio, editing and arranging the material, while Andrew Lappin returned to mix the collection. MOTHERBOARD and Helado Negro join the group as guests, integrating naturally into the collective's already expansive sound.
The result is more than simply another free jazz recording. Future Present Past is presented as a call to action, rooted in the band's belief that there is no outside force coming to solve the problems confronting society. Instead, the responsibility lies with people to care for one another and build something better together.
That philosophy is reflected in the band's statement about the album, which looks toward the millions of people sharing the planet while drawing inspiration from generations of “healers, alchemists, rebels” and others who have challenged existing ways of living and imagining new possibilities.
Irreversible Entanglements see themselves as part of that continuing tradition. Their music becomes a vehicle for carrying those ideas forward—music that refuses imposed chaos and instead urges listeners to keep moving, to cross boundaries and to seek something beyond the noise and distractions of the moment.
The tension between resistance and hope gives Future Present Past its emotional center. The music can be turbulent, dense and dissonant, but it is never without direction. Even in the most challenging passages, there is an underlying sense of movement toward connection.
With Camae Ayewa, Keir Neuringer, Aquiles Navarro, Luke Stewart and Tcheser Holmes operating as a tightly interconnected unit, Irreversible Entanglements continue to demonstrate how free jazz can function as both musical language and communal expression. Future Present Past draws from the past, confronts the present and imagines what might come next—while insisting that the journey forward is something we undertake together.
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