Touch

Description

Tortoise announces Touch, the band's first album since 2016. This new album from the icons of post-everything will be released via International Anthem. The first single "Layered Presence," an exercise in tension combining its gloomy rhythm with a penetrating and piercing melody.With Touch, the members of Tortoise - Jeff Parker, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon and John McEntire - harness their collectivist approach to songwriting, a slightly anarchic but resolutely egalitarian process where ideas triumph over ego for abstract muscle. While one still finds incursions into the dark, elegantly knotted jazz ambiance that flourished on landmark works like Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT, Touch stands out above all for Tortoise's unapologetic embrace of grand gestures. Aerodynamically reimagined krautrock, cranked-up techno rave-ups and pointillist spaghetti western brass bands are all imbued with Tortoise's now-iconic internal logic - as seductive as they are disorienting, an enigma to savor rather than solve.The stylistic diversity also reflects the band's current situation: with two members now in Los Angeles, another in Portland and only two remaining in Chicago, their hometown, their creative process has radically changed since the days when they lived together in a loft in the late 1990s, honing their sound over countless hours of collective experimentation.Recorded across three cities - Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago - Touch is the result of an intentional effort by these five musicians to reconnect, refocus and revitalize their sound for what is perhaps the band's most diverse release to date.