Tortoise Listening Party
To celebrate the release of Touch, the new album from post-everything crew Tortoise, we’ll be hosting a listening party here at the shop, on Saturday 18th October. We’ll play the album in full from 2pm, giving you the chance to hear it a full week before release (and more than three weeks before it appears on streaming platforms). Copies of the album will be available to buy early, and we’ll have free stickers and posters, courtesy of International Anthem, for anyone who comes down.
Pre-order Touch here
Few bands have redrawn the boundaries of instrumental music quite like Tortoise. Formed in Chicago in the early 1990s, they emerged from a close-knit scene that prized experimentation over orthodoxy - one where punk musicians were swapping guitars for vibraphones, and free-jazz drummers were sitting in with dub producers. Out of that melting pot came a sound that resisted definition. With albums like Millions Now Living Will Never Die (1996) and TNT (1998), Tortoise helped put Chicago on the global musical map, influencing everyone from Radiohead to Four Tet while quietly rewriting the rules of what a rock band could be.
They were part of a movement that orbited around labels like Thrill Jockey, Drag City, and Atavistic - a loose community that also included Jim O’Rourke, Gastr del Sol, The Sea and Cake, and Isotope 217°. Rooted in post-punk’s DIY ethos but shaped by jazz improvisation and electronic minimalism, the Chicago scene of that era was all about process: collective, curious, and anti-ego. Tortoise were its gravitational centre - a band who could draw lines between Can, dub, Steve Reich, and Sun Ra, and make it all sound coherent.
Now, more than a decade since their last full-length, Tortoise return with Touch - out October 24th on International Anthem. The album reunites Jeff Parker, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon, and John McEntire - a lineup that has remained remarkably stable since the mid-’90s - across three cities: Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. It’s a long-distance record that somehow still feels communal, full of layered rhythm and a renewed sense of purpose.
Lead single “Layered Presence” sets the tone: a moody, pulsing piece that builds tension through repetition, its searching melodic theme threading through a rhythmic fog. Elsewhere, Touch embraces what the band call “grand gesture” - aerodynamically re-engineered Krautrock, hand-cranked techno, spaghetti-western fanfares - all filtered through their precise, percussive internal logic. There are nods to the dusky ambience of Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT, but Touch feels more tactile, more muscular, a reminder that Tortoise can still surprise.
Their working method remains collective and slightly anarchic: ideas traded and layered until the personality of the band itself emerges. Even spread across three time zones, they sound unified - perhaps more than ever. The album also connects back to their recent Oganesson single and remix EP, which featured reinterpretations by Saul Williams, Broken Social Scene, Makaya McCraven, and others, underscoring how Tortoise’s influence continues to ripple outward through generations of boundary-pushers.
Tortoise have always thrived in the space between worlds - rock and jazz, analog and digital, head and body. With Touch, they reconnect with that restless spirit and remind us why the Chicago scene they helped shape remains one of the most quietly influential movements in modern music.
Not to be missed.
Pre-order Touch here
