Tortoise Returns in October With New Album ‘Touch’

The November 2025 edition of Mojo magazine includes interviews with members of the band Tortoise ahead of the release of their new album “Touch.” It will be their first album in nine years.

“Touch,” a lean 10-track album, both simplifies and complicates elements of Tortoise’s past, according to Mojo’s Yusuke Nagata. Even suggesting sketches for some futuristic symphony.

The album begins with the crunch of a big, distorted guitar. And ends with a radiant, blissed-out hum that conjures the score of a cowboy movie set in space.

For the past 35 years, the Chicago post-rock band has been a motley quintet resembling an assortment of math teachers and music professors, hardcore punk survivors and roadhouse aficionados, Nagata says.

And have provided a compelling case study in perpetual newness at their own methodical pace. Resetting the stage for what might fit within indie rock through their mix of everything from spaghetti western scores to hard bop, luminous drone to pulverizing techno, and prog rock maneuvers to punk rock outbursts.

The first time the band heard the term “post-rock,” however, they were not impressed, according to Nagata. Critic Simon Reynolds invoked it in print around the release of their self-titled 1994 debut. And their lack of vocals and plethora of shifting meters made them ostensible fits.

Now, though, their association with the term’s origins has become a sort of honor, Nagata says.

For drummer John McEntire, Tortoise helped suggest an alternative musical framework. One that emphasizes textures, dynamics, and alternative instrumentation rather than four-on-the-floor all the time.

And for Tortoise’s other drummer John Herndon, it reinforces that they were able to move within the indie rock world without sounding like much else there. Flinging doors open for those who followed.

For Tortoise’s first two decades, proximity was a boon, Nagata says. Every member lived or worked near Central Chicago’s Wicker Park. Rent was cheap, and service jobs and club gigs were abundant.

Meanwhile, the city’s bustling music scene meant jazz, punk, indie rock and electronica musicians rubbed elbows and swapped ideas.

Herndon once dragged a vibraphone four blocks to an early rehearsal. He told guitarist Jeff Parker he wasn’t good enough to play a solo on the instrument.

Parker, who was a working Chicago jazz musician before joining Tortoise, replied, “You know, a solo is just an expression of yourself.”

There was time for their musicianship to catch up with their enthusiasms.