Philadelphia/NY/DC free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements announce their new album Open The Gates (International Anthem), set for release on November 12, 2021. The title track/lead single is available on all digital music platforms today, and it comes accompanied by a music video directed by Cyrus Moussavi.

Open The Gates was recorded in a single day at Rittenhouse Soundworks in Philadelphia, on January 5th, 2021. It is Irreversible Entanglements’ third full-length album, but their first double LP-length album. Across 73 minutes of music the band –featuring poet/vocalist Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), trumpeter Aquiles Navarro & drummer Tcheser Holmes (who released their duo debut Heritage of the Invisible II on International Anthem last year), saxophonist Keir Neuringer, and bassist Luke Stewart – stretch out more than ever, supplementing their raw, organic punk-jazz sound with first-time experiments with electronics and synthesizers.

As described in the liner notes written by Alex Smith, the album is “ethereal shards of jagged onyx, melancholic exploration of the post-colonial debris that surrounds us. Let’s watch and listen, as this platter snakes through the sandy ashes of possible histories, dialogs with a nervous present, and asks to be birthed into a holographic new future. “Together in holy sound!”, the band stitches patient anthems out of the atmosphere. Pulling from a wider sonic vocabulary than on previous excursions, the agit-jazz found here is simultaneously pre- and post-apocalypse, as bass lurches in a tranced-out loop, horns are up in the track grooves like poltergeists playing in the streets, poetry cascades like a warrior call at a Satsang, the drums both wild and refined pulse with Uhuru-heart cadence. This is Irreversible Entanglements on new ground; same as the old ground.”

Ayewa sets off the titular lead single (and top track of the album) with a righteous rallying cry: “It’s energy time!” Driven by percussionist Holmes’ polyrhythmic groove and Stewart’s trunk-rattling bass line, this compact track is probably the closest thing to a summer blockbuster that we’ve ever heard from the band.

Irreversible Entanglements are a band that cultivates the liberation technologies of jazz and associated Black music — root, stem, and branch — into the future. The band emerged organically, out of deep friendships, mutual admiration, ad hoc formations, and a shared activist concern for the beloved legacy of all Black life and culture. International in scope yet indebted to, influenced by, and committed to their specific communities, the band pulls zero punches and reserves no energy in intrepid live sets that proclaim revolutionary love for the people.