diff --git a/docs/release-notes/1725.bugfix.md b/docs/release-notes/1725.bugfix.md
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..c9a6dca3d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/release-notes/1725.bugfix.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+
+Remove upper pin on `dask` and exclude versions broken with sparse indexing {user}`ilan-gold`
diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index a3cb64cbe..3cc1b31a3 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -107,7 +107,7 @@ gpu = ["cupy"]
 cu12 = ["cupy-cuda12x"]
 cu11 = ["cupy-cuda11x"]
 # https://github.com/dask/dask/issues/11290
-dask = ["dask[array]>=2022.09.2,<2024.8.0"]
+dask = ["dask[array]>=2022.09.2,!=2024.8.*,!=2024.9.*"]
 
 [tool.hatch.version]
 source = "vcs"
diff --git a/tests/conftest.py b/tests/conftest.py
index 13fabdb93..9054812f5 100644
--- a/tests/conftest.py
+++ b/tests/conftest.py
@@ -3,9 +3,16 @@
 from functools import partial
 from typing import TYPE_CHECKING
 
+import dask
 import joblib
 import pytest
-from dask.base import normalize_seq, normalize_token, tokenize
+from dask.base import normalize_token, tokenize
+from packaging.version import Version
+
+if Version(dask.__version__) < Version("2024.8.0"):
+    from dask.base import normalize_seq
+else:
+    from dask.tokenize import normalize_seq
 from scipy import sparse
 
 import anndata as ad