Post-rock has long since dissolved into the bloodstream of modern music, its textures and sensibilities repurposed by everyone from jazz experimentalists to ambient producers to indie bands trying to sound profound. But if there’s a group that still holds the keys to the kingdom, it’s Tortoise—the Chicago architects who once made post-rock feel like a manifesto. Across the ’90s, they blurred the lines between rock, jazz, dub, and electronica with a precision that felt both cerebral and sensual, crafting head music that somehow still moved the body. They were the thinking person’s groove merchants, the rare band who could make a vibraphone solo feel like a thesis statement.
After nearly a decade away, Touch arrives as both a reminder and a rupture. It’s Tortoise’s first record for International Anthem—a label whose jazz-inflected adventurism owes a visible debt to the band’s cross-genre blueprint—and fittingly, it’s also co-branded with Nonesuch, the art-rock home that once helped usher Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot into canon. The lineage feels poetic: Tortoise helped shape a Chicago scene where restless experimentation became a civic value, and now, in partnership with their progeny, they return to test its limits once again.
If 2016’s The Catastrophist was Tortoise’s “song” album—an almost playful detour that flirted with accessibility—Touch is its twitchy counterpoint. From the opening track, “Vexations,” the band sound wired, fragmented, even irritable. The groove is all sharp corners and metal shavings, a kind of jazz-funk panic attack that collapses into a hip-hop lurch before vaporizing into a haze of tremolo guitars. It’s a miniature study in anxiety and release—Tortoise re-learning how to breathe through clenched teeth. Elsewhere, “Layered Presence” feels like Discipline-era King Crimson remixed by Kraftwerk, while “Works and Days” channels Oval’s glitchy hauntings, bowing out on a sub-bass dirge that blurs the line between field recording and signal decay.
The sound design is dense, even abrasive: distortion, static, the hum of something overworked and under-slept. It’s not just aesthetic—it’s emotional shorthand for the album’s remote-making process. Scattered across cities and studios, Tortoise built Touch in isolation, sending ideas into the ether rather than building them in a shared room. The result is both eerie and fascinating. There’s an airlessness to some of these tracks, a sense that the band is arguing with the machines. But then, inevitably, one member cuts through—Jeff Parker’s guitar smolders into clarity, John McEntire’s drums punch holes in the fog—and suddenly, the record feels alive again. That tension between distance and connection gives Touch its pulse.
The second half exhales. “Promenade à deux” ushers in a rare calm, strings sighing over liquid percussion like a chamber orchestra lost in space. “A Title Comes” and “Rated OG” resurrect the group’s trademark balance between motorik drive and cinematic drift: vibraphones pulse, guitars shimmer, and the mix crackles like tape left too close to a radiator. “Oganesson” digs into that groove and lets it burn slow, all interlocking basslines and rusted circuitry.
Closer “Night Gang” is pure Tortoise theater—an almost anthemic sendoff that toys with the idea of grandeur. Synths rise like fake sunlight, surf guitars crash like waves in a dream sequence, and just as it threatens to become triumphant, it cuts out. It’s the band winking at their own myth: a post-rock curtain call that refuses the big finale.
Thirty years in, Tortoise remain too slippery to canonize. Touch isn’t a victory lap so much as a restless continuation, a reminder that even the godfathers of post-rock are still mutating. The darkness of its first half never quite resolves, but that’s the point—Tortoise have learned that beauty lives in the static, in the glitch, in the unfinished transmission that never stops searching for signal.
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