Free Jazz Collective Irreversible Entanglements Returns with Fifth Studio Album: Future Present Past

Free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements announces their return with their fifth studio album, Future Present Past, out March 27th via Impulse!. The announcement comes alongside the release of two singles, “Don’t Lose Your Head” and “Vibrate Higher” both featuring friend and frequent collaborator MOTHERBOARD.

Don’t lose your head messing with the gods is the imperative that kicks off Irreversible Entanglements’ new double single. “Don’t Lose Your Head” serves as a rallying cry, with vocalists Camae Ayewa and featured guest MOTHERBOARD both offering up subdued yet passionate deliveries. Where DLYH features a tight arrangement over an agile Tcheser Holmes groove, “Vibrate Higher” answers in a more brooding and looser vein, reflecting its genesis as a live recording for a capacity crowd at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works (recorded on bassist Luke Stewart’s birthday). It opens with Keir Neuringer’s atmospheric synth drones punctuated by Stewart’s expressive bass, growing into a barrage of percussion, as voices and horns alike enjoin the listener to make like its title. As the music’s uneasy density seems to reach its breaking point, Ayewa calls for a “different atmosphere,” and trumpeter Aquiles Navarro shifts the song with dissonant perfection as though through a portal into an entrancing rhythmic vamp. It’s the type of composed-in-the-moment journey that leaves Irreversible Entanglements’ audiences feeling truly transported.

For their fifth album, the band gladly returned to historic Van Gelder Studio in October of 2024 to record most of the main tracks. Future Present Past sees the quintet at the height of its group improvisational-compositional-rhythmic powers, weaving diasporic liberation music into our shared story of existence - futures full of possibility, the present with all its uncertainties, and strands of the past as wellsprings of ancestral wisdom. To flesh out this more complex sound, additional recording and production took place over the following nine months. Jonathan Schenke worked closely with the band editing and arranging in his Brooklyn studio in the summer of 2025 and Andrew Lappin returned to mix the collection. Guests MOTHERBOARD and Helado Negro seamlessly blend into the collective sound. The result is a call to action by the band, who recognize that no one is coming to save us; we must look after each other.

The band shared this statement about the record: - The weight of a certain world can feel cruel and unusual. Another world uplifts. We form as five and transform into billions. Billions of us on this planet sharing this journey through existence—futures full of possibility and potential, the present with all its anxieties and uncertainties, pasts as wellsprings of ancestral wisdom and histories’ warnings.

This album is five standing on the shoulders of legions. The healers, the alchemists, the rebels, the mothers and fathers who have fought and weaved and invented new ways of being, seeing, and balancing the frequencies of this planet towards trans-dimensional liberation and universal understanding.

We assume our role in this music as messengers, continuing in the tradition’s long march along the arc of the universe. Freedom fighters telling us not to lose our heads amidst imposed chaos. 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.

The spirit moves us to sing these fight songs, to sing fight songs, we overcome. To hold on, to keep going, together we overcome.

Future Present Past comes out on March 27th via Impulse!

Irreversible Entanglements Live:

• Friday May 1st - Turin, IT - Torino Jazz Festival
• Saturday May 2nd - Cagliari, IT - Teatro Massimo
• Tuesday May 5th - Innsbruck, AT - Treibhaus
• Wednesday May 6th - Antwerp, BE - De Roma
• Thursday May 7th - Liege, BE - Jazz à Liège