Tortoise - Touch

Tortoise announce Touch, the legendary band's first new album since 2016, via International Anthem.

With Touch, Tortoise members—Jeff Parker, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon, and John McEntire—apply their collectivist approach to songwriting, a slightly anarchistic but decidedly egalitarian process where ideas triumph over ego on their journey toward abstract muscularity. While we still see forays into the dark, elegant, and twisted jazz atmospheres that flourished on landmark works like Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT, what stands out most on Touch is their bold embrace of grandiosity. Streamlined, reworked krautrock, handcrafted techno rhythms, and pointillist spaghetti western fanfares are imbued with Tortoise's signature internal logic: as engaging as it is bewildering, a puzzle to savor rather than solve.

Recorded across three cities (Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago), Touch is the result of these five wonderful musicians' efforts to reconnect, center, and revitalize their sound for what is perhaps the group's most diverse release to date.