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,” is an exercise in tension, combining its gloomy rhythm with a piercing, penetrating melody. With Touch, the members of Tortoise — Jeff Parker, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon and John McEntire — tap into their collectivist approach to songwriting, a slightly anarchic but resolutely egalitarian process where ideas triumph over ego for an abstract musculature. While there are still incursions into the dark, elegantly knotted jazz atmosphere 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, hand-cranked techno rave-ups and pointillist spaghetti western fanfares are all infused with Tortoise’s now emblematic internal logic — just as alluring as they are baffling, an enigma to be savored rather than solved. 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 their hometown of Chicago, their creative process has changed radically since the days when they lived together in a loft in the late 1990s, refining 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.