TORTOISE - Touch

What should we expect from the new release by Tortoise? A radical overhaul of their sound toward unexplored horizons? A blend of genres so extreme as to have seemed irreconcilable until now? Or a new attitude capable of showing the way to future disciples of the post-rock religion?

None of the above. On “Touch”, the new album from the Chicago band, there's no revolution to speak of, but rather a confirmation of their unmistakable sonic identity.

After nine years of silence, the veteran ensemble of visionary trailblazers is back in action. As tradition dictates, on “Touch” every melody is broken down, dissected, stripped of its narrative linearity and immersed in a purifying bath of rhythm amid sulfurous pulses, Warp-style micro-beats and digital glitches. Then, as in an alchemical ritual, the melody is reborn, reinterpreted by other instruments or absorbed into a new sonic universe, often the polar opposite of the one before.

It's a highly evocative game of appearances and disappearances, one that seems to allude to the transience of earthly things, to the cycle of life and to the routine of days relentlessly ticking by. In this sense, "Works And Days" is perhaps the most emblematic passage: a lazy synth line rises above a rhythmic pulse steeped in industrial fumes; when the trumpets and vibraphone come in, the track seems to take flight, only to be immediately pulled back to earth by the measured toll of unsettling bells.

"Touch" brings together all the recurring elements of Tortoise's career: the spaghetti-western guitar tracing phrasings over the rough rhythms of "Vexations"; the tension of suspended arpeggios, doubled by vibraphone, in "A Title Comes"; and even the saturation that closes "Oganesson", which could recall the famous "CD skip" effect from "Djed".

Nor is the band's customary use of electronics missing, evident in the minimal house of "Elka", nor the equally recurring kraut-rock spirit, with the motorik pulse of Neu!/Stereolab on "Axial Seamount", where luminous Eno-style synths seem to humanize the mechanical beats.

The cinematic power of their compositions remains, as ever, the star of the show. It's hard not to sense a noir atmosphere in the synth openings of the dark dub track "Promenade à deux", or a nod to blaxploitation and the Italian poliziottesco in the propulsive "Rated OG", right through to the epic "Night Gang", which closes the album with a luminous, solemn gait.

The ten tracks on "Touch" run unusually short compared to the long suites that, in the past, let their compositions breathe. This makes for a more accessible listen, but also a less memorable one: some passages, like "Layered Presence", come across as excellent concentrates of ideas that on other occasions would have been given room to develop further.

The Chicago of Tortoise and the Soma Electronic Music Studios is by now a memory: only two members still live in the "Windy City", while John McEntire resides in Oregon and Jeff Parker and John Herndon have relocated to Los Angeles. All this has made the pre-production work more complicated, where every spark of creativity counts. More than a new chapter, "Touch" feels like an ideal anthology of their sonic history: a lucid, self-aware return that looks back at the past with the calm of someone who, having once innovated a language, now observes its traces.

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15/11/2025