Touch

Tortoise are still on a creative roll, even if it’s a very slow, drawn-out one.

Most of these instrumentals packs a punch, and in a variety of different ways. For the most part, crucially, it sounds as though the musicians are enjoying themselves. [Dec 2025, p.103]

Touch is a surprisingly coherent album, demonstrating the band’s strengths of agile melodic sensibility, nuanced performances, and immersive production.

All of Touch reflects the curiosity that has driven Tortoise since the beginning -- and still drives them all these years later.

What a blessed relief, given all this, that Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Doug McCombs, John McEntire and Jeff Parker, collectively, still sound wholly and unapologetically like themselves. [Nov 2025, p.60]

There’s a careful sequencing to the record that one can only appreciate listening to it in its entirety. Let it take you places.

The wait, rewarded. [Dec 2025, p.85]

it's not just a band getting back together after nearly a decade apart, but a band reaffirming the ideals that animated them in the first place. [Nov 2025, p.29]

“Promenade à deux” finally eases into something like a classic Tortoise chill-out space, albeit with a more widescreen approach, uncharacteristically graced by viola and cello. From there, beginning with “A Title Comes,” the LP’s second half finds perfect balance between signal noise and cinematic sweep, with signature vibraphone pulses and swooning guitar progressions rubbing against blissed-out Terry Riley organ tones and motorik chug.

We’re left bewildered, occasionally underwhelmed, and yet somehow still thrilled. Well, nothing to do but take it for another spin.

If Touch were the first album by a brand new band, it would likely be judged as an unequivocal triumph — but Tortoise suffer from the burden of their iconic back catalogue.