Tortoise

A rhythm section that went looking for work

Tortoise started as two players hiring themselves out rather than as a band. Bassist Doug McCombs, then in Eleventh Dream Day, and drummer John Herndon began working together in the late 1980s with the idea of operating as a freelance rhythm section. By 1990 that arrangement had settled into a group based in Chicago.

The line-up filled out quickly with Dan Bitney and John McEntire — both of whom drum and also play vibraphone, marimba and keyboards — and Bundy K. Brown on bass and guitar between 1991 and 1994. The self-titled debut arrived in 1994 on Thrill Jockey. David Pajo played guitar and bass from 1995 to 1998. Guitarist Jeff Parker joined in 1996 and has been there ever since, completing the five-piece that still tours: Bitney, Herndon, McCombs, McEntire and Parker.

The records that set the template

The second album, Millions Now Living Will Never Die, came out in 1996 and opened with a 21-minute piece that folded hip-hop rhythm into rock — the kind of construction that got the band labelled as architects of post-rock whether they wanted the label or not. TNT followed in 1998, Standards in 2001, It's All Around You in 2004, Beacons of Ancestorship in 2009 and The Catastrophist in 2016. Along the way the music absorbed krautrock, dub, minimalism, electronics and jazz, all of it instrumental.

Herndon has been blunt about the genre tag. "When I first heard it, my kneejerk reaction was, 'I never got rid of my AC/DC records, I don't know what this means,'" he told the Chicago Sun-Times. His own description of what the band does is more useful: "When Tortoise is operating best, we can set a mood and fill a space with a unique sound that is not really jazz, not really rock, not really electronic."

Records have come out through Thrill Jockey, Warp, City Slang and Domino over the years, with the most recent on International Anthem.

Three cities, one record

Touch took a long time partly because the band no longer lives in one place. Three of the five members have moved to the west coast, to Los Angeles and Portland, while the group keeps its Chicago roots. Work began in 2021, with members lining up diaries for week-long sessions and recording wherever they happened to be: Flora Recording & Playback in Portland, 64 Sound in Los Angeles and Electrical Audio in Chicago. McEntire recorded and mixed it.

The writing method has not changed much. Members bring fragments, and as Herndon put it, "we'd start pecking away at it" until trial and error produces a finished piece. External deadlines eventually forced the record shut.

The lead single "Oganesson" appeared on 27 March 2025, later followed by a remix EP with reworkings from Saul Williams, Heba Kadry, Patrick Carney, Broken Social Scene and Makaya McCraven. "Layered Presence", with a video directed by Mikel Patrick Avery, arrived with the album announcement on 9 September 2025. Touch — ten tracks, 38 minutes and 53 seconds, on International Anthem and Nonesuch — was released on physical formats and download on 24 October 2025 and on streaming services on 11 November 2025. Videos were eventually made for five of its tracks.

How it landed

Reviews were mostly strong. Touch holds a Metacritic score of 81 out of 100, taken as universal acclaim. PopMatters called it "a cinematic record that is profoundly human", and it later turned up on that publication's ranking of the 30 best rock albums of 2025 as well as The Wire's top ten for the year. AllMusic's notice fixed on the band's continued curiosity after three decades.

Not everyone was convinced. The Quietus objected to clashing musical elements, and Exclaim! argued that the weight of the band's own history coloured how the record was heard. Commercially it did what a record like this does: number 11 on the UK album downloads chart, number 13 on the UK independent albums chart and number 66 in Scotland.

The band marked the release at home on 11 November 2025 with a performance alongside the Chicago Philharmonic at the Auditorium Theatre on East Ida B. Wells Drive, with tickets from $71 — an unusually formal setting for a group that normally plays clubs.

A year of touring, and where it goes next

Since then the touring has been close to continuous. European dates ran through January 2026 in Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, Belgium and Italy, with a second continental leg in April taking in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland and Portugal. In between came festival and one-off shows in the United States, including the Noise Pop Music and Arts Festival at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on 27 February and Stop/Time at the Englert Theatre in Iowa City on 4 April. Chicago got Warm Love Cool Dreams on 23 May, and Australia followed almost immediately — Oxford Art Factory in Sydney on 27 May, the Corner Hotel in Melbourne on 30 May.

A North American summer run was announced and put on sale on 27 March 2026. It opened on 25 June at Ruins at Knockdown Center in New York, took in Marco Benevento's Follow the Arrow festival in upstate New York on 27 June, then King of Prussia, Washington DC, Cambridge, Burlington, Montreal and Toronto on 3 July, before west-coast dates that carried through to Zebulon in Los Angeles on 2 August.

The autumn brings the band back to Britain and Ireland. The run starts on 31 October at The Crossing in Digbeth, then Glasgow's Queen Margaret Union on 1 November and two nights at the Button Factory in Dublin. London falls on 4 November as part of Pitchfork Music Festival London, whose sixth edition runs from 2 to 8 November across venues including the Roundhouse, the Royal Festival Hall, KOKO and Hackney Church; Tortoise were named in the first wave of artists alongside The Avalanches, Noname, Actress and Olof Dreijer, and tickets are already on sale. The mainland leg continues with Le Guess Who? in Utrecht, Spanish dates in Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid, Kulturzentrum franz.K in Reutlingen on 9 November and the Rolling Stone Beach festival at Weissenhäuser Strand on 13 and 14 November.

What happens on stage

The current show runs about an hour and a half. At the Concert Hall in Toronto on 3 July 2026 the band started at 9.15pm and finished at 10.45pm, playing thirteen songs plus two encores, with no support act listed. The set opened with "Night Gang" and "Monica", worked through "In Sarah, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Women and Men", "I Set My Face to the Hillside", "Gesceap", "Prepare Your Coffin", "Dot/Eyes" and "Ten-Day Interval", and closed out with "Crest" before encores of "The Equator (Remix)", "Swung From the Gutters" and finally "Rated OG". New material sits inside that rather than dominating it — "Layered Presence" fourth, "Vexations" eleventh.

The staging is the band itself. Reviewing the first of two nights at the Aladdin Theater in Portland on 3 March 2026 for Spectrum Culture, Holly Hazelwood described members rotating around the stage, "swapping instruments and drumkits ceaselessly", with a passage of two percussionists sharing a single vibraphone singled out as hypnotic. Material came from at least six albums, five songs from Touch among them, and Hazelwood reported that "Vexations" and "Layered Presence" already sounded as settled as older pieces like "Gigantes" and "Monica". The loudest response of the night went to the TNT material: the reaction to "Ten-Day Interval" was close to Pavlovian. Her summary was that "the juicy sonic magic they weave together feels as spry as ever".