Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue

On May 5, 2026, Alabaster DePlume will release Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue, an EP that functions, as its subtitle suggests, as a coda to something larger.

The title alone carries considerable weight. Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew positions itself as a document addressed across generations — a letter written not to contemporaries but to descendants, people who do not yet exist. The word "Epilogue" appended to that title implies that the main text has already been delivered, that this EP arrives after a conclusion rather than before one. Whether the parent work is a full-length album, a live project, a suite of performances, or something else entirely isn't specified in the available information, but the framing is deliberate enough to suggest that DePlume intends this release to be understood as part of a sequence rather than as a standalone object.

Alabaster DePlume is a British artist whose work has consistently resisted easy categorization. His recordings and performances draw on jazz, spoken word, and a kind of meditative lyricism that sits somewhere between song and incantation. His releases have appeared on International Anthem, the Chicago-based label known for platforming artists whose work operates at the intersection of jazz, experimental music, and social consciousness — a roster that has included Makaya McCraven, Irreversible Entanglements, and Damon Locks. DePlume's association with that label placed him in a particular lineage of musicians for whom improvisation and intention are not opposing forces but the same thing approached from different angles.

His previous work has often carried titles and concepts that are plainly ethical in character — music that asks the listener to consider care, presence, and what it means to attend to another person. The title Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew extends that tendency into something more explicitly temporal. The past tense of "I Knew" is worth noting: not "I know," but "I knew." The speaker is retrospective, already at some remove from the knowledge being transmitted. The children of children haven't arrived yet, but the speaker has already finished knowing whatever it is they're passing on. There is a quality of completion in that construction, and the "Epilogue" designation reinforces it.

What the EP actually contains — how many tracks, who performed on it, whether it was recorded in the same sessions as any preceding work, what instruments or voices appear — is not yet disclosed. That opacity is not unusual for a release still months away, but it does mean that the most interesting questions remain entirely open. Is this a shorter, more intimate addendum to a larger record, trimmed of the expansiveness that a full album might permit? Or does the epilogue format allow for something more oblique, less resolved — a set of pieces that couldn't fit the arc of a main work precisely because they resist arc? DePlume's practice doesn't obviously tend toward the tidy, which makes the choice to label something an epilogue more curious than conventional.

The release date, a Tuesday in early May 2026, follows standard industry practice for new music. Nothing about the timing signals an unusual rollout strategy, at least from what's available.

For listeners who have followed DePlume's career, this EP will likely register as the next installment in an ongoing body of work that rewards close attention and returns poorly on casual listening. His music tends to ask something of the people in the room with it — or in front of it, headphones on — in a way that makes the epilogue concept feel appropriate rather than anticlimactic. An epilogue, in literary terms, is not an afterthought; it is often where the emotional consequence of everything that came before finally settles. Whether that's what DePlume is doing here, or whether the title is functioning more metaphorically, is a question the release itself will answer. For now, the framing is enough to suggest that Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue is not being offered as a minor release but as a considered endpoint to something DePlume has apparently been working through for some time.

Those most likely to seek this out are already oriented toward the corner of contemporary music that DePlume inhabits — listeners who follow International Anthem's output, who have time for music that moves slowly and means what it says, and who are drawn to artists for whom the conceptual and the emotional are inseparable rather than competing impulses.