Tortoise
25.01.2026
Teatro del PavoneBio
Tortoise was born in 1990 in one of the most important musical workshops in the United States: Chicago. It is composed – in its most recent line-up – by Dan Bitney, Doug McCombs, Jeff Parker, John Herndon, and John McEntire,and it’s one of the stand-out bands of the post-rock movement born in the Nineties. It introduced a rock sound contaminated by numerous influences like jazz and electronic music.
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 10 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 the then-emerging, so-called “post-rock” sound (a wording band never have really been happy with), 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.”
Tortoise will release their new album Touch, the first new album from the groundbreaking group since 2016, on October 24, 2025 on LP, CD, and digital download (and on streaming services on November 11, 2025). This new record from the post-everything icons comes via International Anthem and Nonesuch Records. Lead single “Layered Presence” — an exercise in tension that pairs its moody pulse with a ringing, searching melodic theme — is out on all DSPs now. In March, Tortoise have already released “Oganesson” — “an off-kilter, 7/4 funk tune with a spy-movie ambience” (New York Times) that is included on the new album.
With Touch, Tortoise bandmembers 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.
The band, which originally formed in Chicago in 1990, comprises Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Douglas McCombs, John McEntire, and Jeff Parker.
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