The avant-garde compositions of long-time instrumental stalwarts Tortoise shine through the noise on the enigmatic Touch.
Release date: October 24, 2025 | International Anthem | Facebook | Instagram | Bandcamp
In the grand scheme of things, Chicago band Tortoise has always been its own kind of ‘thing’. For almost forty years, the group – led by founding members Doug McCombs and John Herndon – has carved such a finely chiseled niche into that grand scheme that their compositions seem to be the only thing that could possibly fit. Simultaneously a great American rock band, an experimental jazz quintet, and an electronic outfit worthy of Aphex Twin-like praise, Tortoise has managed to fuse all of these ideas into one instantly recognizable sound.
On their new album – and their first in nearly a decade – the band continues to run their eclectic instrumentation through their own custom-built function machine. Touch is their eighth full-length record, and while it unmistakably sounds like Tortoise, subtle nuances make it clear that this album could only have been made in this particular moment in time.
In some ways, it was inevitable that a band so steeped in the fringes of popular music history would create something as intimate and observational as Touch. The members are older now – the elder statesmen of Chicago’s experimental scene – and though most live outside the city, they still view the world through a distinctly Midwestern lens. With age comes a certain wisdom: the ability to perch above the fray without shaking a fist at the sky.
As such, the band feels no need to rewrite TNT or Standards, both albums that redefined what could be done with instrumental rock music, for lack of a better term. Touch is simply a band reacting to the times in the only way it knows how. The music, on a whole, is a more simplified, stripped-down version of the band, as if in their old(er) age, they’ve decided to get rid of all the excess baggage, buy an RV and see the world one park at a time.
“Layered Presence”, one of the earlier singles dropped during the past year, is a great example of this pragmatism. The song includes all of what makes Tortoise who they are – the vibraphones, the circular chord changes, repetitive, catchy melodies – but also does so in an tight, economic way. The guitar solo lingers on a single note before meandering up and down the fretboard, like someone humming to themselves while hooking the RV up to the utility post at a local KOA campground.
Things get even more interesting on “Works and Days”, a track that shimmies down the street like a Robert Crumb cartoon. As with much of Tortoise’s work, the band imbues seemingly straightforward arrangements with the spirit of jazz. Fifty years ago, their Moog synths and treated sounds might have been trumpets and tenor saxophones. That transposition of jazz instrumentation into the electronic realm gives Tortoise their trademark futuristic sound. On “Works and Days”, the synth melody could have been lifted from one of Charles Mingus’s more melodic passages – a swaggering line that materializes through the heavy smoke of a basement village jazz bar.
One of the album’s most beguiling tracks, “Axial Seamount”, takes its name from one of the world’s largest underwater volcanoes. The song slowly erupts, like gasses oozing from the great rift and hot spot the volcano straddles. And, like the seamount itself, the song seems to be many things at once. The rhythm moves with the confidence of Air‘s “Sexy Boy”, while its melody is punctuated by blasts of delay-drenched guitar noise. A counter-melody lays atop like lava cooling amongst the oceanic crust, a bed of inorganic material ready to reshape the earth beneath it. A sudden key change hastens a violent eruption of melodic mayhem. It’s a hypnotic journey through Earth’s core – a fine display of 21st century showmanship.
In keeping with the scientific allegories, the penultimate song, “Oganesson”, plays tribute to the newest element that graces the walls of chemistry classrooms across the world. Synthetically designed, and only lasting for less than a second, the element oganesson is a tribute to humanity’s insatiable curiosity and a symbol of our whimsical nature. And whimsy has always been central to Tortoise‘s ethos. The jazzy chord progressions and rhythmic complexities float effortlessly, a barely maintained presence, soon to be taken by the wind into whatever new manifestation they may take. It’s an atomic fission of sound, here one minute and gone the next.
Only five atoms of oganesson have ever been successfully produced, a funny and fitting connection for Tortoise to make. The band has always been about filling the spaces that science predicts, a function machine in which the language is sound and not numbers. There is a predictive quality to what they produce and, like math – or the periodic table – they are as easy to consume or as difficult to understand as you’d like. The depths are yours to determine. Unlike oganesson, however, the songs Tortoise write are built to last. They have staying power, a soundtrack for the smallest parts of our lives.
Take the spaghetti-western guitars of closer “Night Gang”. It’s not so much the Old West as it is post-apocalyptic West. “Night Gang” is the sound of a Mad Max group of characters, sated on the charred flesh of other settlers, and hogging the water of a recently acquired well. There’s a spirit to the music, an everlasting desire to survive, even if that means changing direction (or in the case of Tortoise, changing key) in order to get closer to where you’re going.
Tortoise isn’t leading us anywhere specific. They’re stepping back, watching the chaos unfold. Like the traveling theater troupe in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, they’re here to entertain – but beneath every ragtag group of performers lies a mainline to the truth. Tortoise’s music courses through that line like light through fiberoptic cable. Touch is just another signal in that continuum, another entry in the Chicago function machine that’s been running for nearly four decades. What comes out is as satisfyingly unpredictable as ever – another small feat of human ingenuity…and whimsy. Always the whimsy.
