Tortoise – Touch (Vinyl)

Today, Tortoise announces Touch, the first new album from the groundbreaking group since 2016. This new record from the post-everything icons comes via International Anthem and Nonesuch Records on LP, CD, and digital download on October 24, 2025. Lead single Layered Presence — an exercise in tension that pairs its moody pulse with a ringing, searching melodic theme — is out on all DSPs now.

With Touch, the Tortoise bandmembers — Jeff Parker, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon, and John McEntire — harness their collectivist songwriting approach, a slightly anarchistic but resolutely egalitarian process where ideas triumph over ego towards an abstracted muscularity. While there are still excursions into the dusky, elegantly gnarled jazz ambience that flourished on landmark works like Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT, Touch is perhaps most remarkable for Tortoise's unapologetic embrace of grand gesture.

Aerodynamically re-engineered Krautrock, hand-cranked techno rave-ups, and pointillist spaghetti western fanfares are all imbued with Tortoise's now-signature internal logic — equally alluring and confounding, a puzzle to be savored rather than solved.

The stylistic diversity is also a reflection of the bands current operating circumstances: With two members now in Los Angeles, another in Portland, and just two remaining in the bands Chicago hometown, their creative process has shifted dramatically from when they lived together in a loft space in the late 1990s, honing their sound over endless hours of collective experimentation.

Recorded between the three cities — Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago — Touch is the result of an intentional effort by these five musicians to reconnect, recenter, and reinvigorate their sound for what is perhaps the group’s most diverse release to date.

Black Vinyl / CD

Tracklist:
1 Vexations
2 Layered Presence
3 Works and Days
4 Elka
5 Promenade à deux
6 Axial Seamount
7 A Title Comes
8 Rated OG
9 Oganesson
10 Night Gang