Touch, the first new album from the groundbreaking group Tortoise since 2016, is due on LP, CD, and digital download on October 24, 2025, and on streaming services on November 11, 2025, all via International Anthem and Nonesuch Records. The lead single, "Layered Presence," is out now, along with a video filmed and directed by Mikel Patrick Avery, which you can see here:

With Touch, the Tortoise band members—Jeff Parker, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon, and John McEntire—harness their collectivist songwriting approach, a slightly anarchistic but resolutely egalitarian process where ideas triumph over ego towards an abstracted muscularity. While there are still excursions into the dusky, elegantly gnarled jazz ambience that flourished on landmark works like Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT, Touch is perhaps most remarkable for Tortoise's unapologetic embrace of grand gesture. Aerodynamically re-engineered Krautrock, hand-cranked techno rave-ups, and pointillist spaghetti western fanfares are all imbued with Tortoise's now-signature internal logic—equally alluring and confounding, a puzzle to be savored rather than solved.

The stylistic diversity is also a reflection of the band's current operating circumstances: With two members now in Los Angeles, another in Portland, and just two remaining in the band's Chicago hometown, their creative process has shifted dramatically from when they lived together in a loft space in the late 1990s, honing their sound over endless hours of collective experimentation.

Recorded between the three cities—Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago—Touch is the result of an intentional effort by these five musicians to reconnect, recenter, and reinvigorate their sound for what is perhaps the group’s most diverse release to date.

Touch is the culmination of a long-gestating reunion, the results of which Tortoise first shared this past March, when they released "Oganesson"—"an off-kilter, 7/4 funk tune with a spy-movie ambience" (New York Times) that is included on the new album—ahead of a career-spanning opening night performance at the boundary-crossing music festival Big Ears. They followed that with the Oganesson Remixes EP, which featured reworks of the track from poet and activist Saul Williams, prolific mastering engineer Heba Kadry, Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney, indie music icons Broken Social Scene, and International Anthem labelmate Makaya McCraven.

Tortoise is widely considered one of the most influential music groups of the last 40 years, with a wide-reaching impact on the contemporary music scene. Pitchfork says: “Imagine a graphic showing all the bands the five members of Tortoise were in before they came together and then all the bands they went on to play with after. At the top of the funnel you have groups ranging from dreamy psych-rock to earthy post-punk crunch, including Eleventh Dream Day, Bastro, Slint, and the Poster Children; on the 'post-Tortoise' end are groups focusing on electro-jazz and twangy instrumental rock like Isotope 217, Chicago Underground, and Brokeback. In this graphic, Tortoise is the choke point, the one project that has elements of all these sounds but is never defined by nor committed to any of them. Instead, Tortoise floats free, a planchette moving over a Ouija board guided by ten sets of fingers, where everyone watches the arrow float in one direction but no one is quite sure how it gets there or who is doing the pushing.”

Initially hailed as pace-setters of an emergent, cinematic instrumental evolution of alternative rock, the Chicago Tribune called Tortoise’s sound “mood music that refuses to be shoved into the background, as inviting as it is challenging.” Releasing just seven albums since 1990 — including classics like 1996’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die, 1998’s TNT, and 2001’s Standards —Tortoise has steadily and intuitively evolved across its life, creating genreless music that is as timeless as it is ahead of the curve.

The band’s legacy goes beyond its recorded output, as well. Per the New York Times: “While Tortoise's albums have experimented with the editing and overdubbing possibilities of the studio, the band thrives performing in real time.” Rolling Stone deems Tortoise “a live marvel,” while Pitchfork further says the band’s performances reveal that “at heart, they’re a supremely fun band, wide open to all sorts of sonic possibilities.”