[Cover photo credit to Annemone]
Free Jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements has announced their return with their fifth studio album, Future Present Past, out March 27th, 2026, 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” serves as a “rallying cry,” with vocalists Camae Ayewa and featured guest Motherboard. “Vibrate Higher” is “more brooding and looser” and began as a live recording for a capacity crowd at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works (recorded on bassist Luke Stewart’s birthday).
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 “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.
The album 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 share 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.“
Irreversible Entanglements Live
Thursday, March 26th – Queens, NY – Knockdown Center (co-release show with Shabaka)
Friday, March 27th – Philadelphia, PA – Solar Myth
Saturday, March 28th – Philadelphia, PA – Solar Myth
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
