Tortoise - new album and US and European tour dates 2025/26.
Friday, October 24, 2025
Tortoise will release their new album "Touch" on 24th October 2025. They will be touring extensively in the US & Europe from October 2025 to April 2026, including dates in London, Bristol & Leeds.
We have received the following press release;
Tortoise Release New Album Touch — Out Now via International Anthem / Nonesuch
TORTOISE RELEASE NEW ALBUM TOUCH ON LP / CD / DIGITAL DOWNLOAD
SERIES OF SPECIAL SHOWS THIS AUTUMN, INCLUDING BARBICAN, LONDON, BRISTOL, LEEDS, PLUS US + EU TOUR DATES IN 20
Artist: Tortoise
Album: Touch
Formats: Vinyl, CD, Digital Download
Label: International Anthem x Nonesuch Records
PRAISE FOR TORTOISE & TOUCH
“A sense of playful hybridity runs through Touch — from the sci-fi spaghetti western soundscaping of ‘Vexations’ to the pulsating man-machine techno of ‘Elka.’”
The Guardian
“These songs are full to bursting with sounds and ideas, suggesting a kind of wide-eyed maximalism, as though nothing is off limits except silence.”
UNCUT
“For Touch, they’ve regrouped for another subtle advance in their evolution.”
SPIN
“To listen closely is to uncover minute surprises, which, with patience, expand in depth and scope: what if the anodyne black lacquered walnut table top harbours intricate patterns, cryptic siguls, a djinn? Such figurative treasures abound on Touch.”
The Wire
“The wait, rewarded”
MOJO
“With references to a demanding work by a love-sick and hurt Erik Satie, a submarine volcano in the Pacific and the heaviest element in the periodic table, there’s prompted doses of science, geography and the avant-garde made human with emotional pulls and swept gestures that could be called romantic.”
Monolith Cocktail
“Touch is a display of perpetually unpredictable, beautiful, and vital music, for which Tortoise remains the standard bearer.”
Aquarium Drunkard
“It sounds more than anything like they’re simply having fun playing music together again after a decade, and that feeling is infectious.”
Treble
“There’s a careful sequencing to the record that one can only appreciate listening to it in its entirety. Let it take you places.”
Glide Magazine
Today, Tortoise — the iconic ensemble that “reset the stage for what might fit within indie rock” (MOJO) — release Touch, the first new album from the groundbreaking group since 2016, via International Anthem and Nonesuch Records on LP, CD, and digital download (available on streaming services on November 11). The band also shares a video for third streaming single and album standout “A Title Comes” by Nespy5euro.
Listen to & watch “A Title Comes” here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BFiC-KJ8pU
With Touch, the Tortoise band members — Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Douglas McCombs, John McEntire, and Jeff Parker — 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 desert guitar panoramas 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.
(Read more about Tortoise, their ground-breaking sound “informed by everything from jungle to Krautrock and musique concréte,” and the creation of Touch in a feature that ran September 19 over at The Guardian.)
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/sep/19/wed-play-for-a-frozen-burrito-post-rockers-tortoise-on-the-changing-face-of-chicago-steve-albini-and-their-new-gen-fans
A series of special live shows is planned through the end of the year, including the performance with Chicago Philharmonic, a three-night weekend stand at NYC’s Bowery Ballroom, and two shows at the Barbican for EFG London Jazz Festival.
Tortoise will then embark on European tours in early 2026, with more dates to be announced soon. The full list of confirmed dates and ticket links is below.
Touch is out now, purchase it here.
https://tortoise.lnk.to/Touch
(Touch cover art by Paw Grabowski)
Credits & Tracklist for Touch:
1. Vexations
2. Layered Presence
3. Works and Days
4. Elka
5. Promenade à deux
6. Axial Seamount
7. A Title Comes
8. Rated OG
9. Oganesson
10. Night Gang
TOUR DATES
Marfa TX - Saturday October 25th - Flying Island
Chicago IL - Tuesday November 11th - The Auditorium w/ Chicago Philharmonic
Lexington KY - Wednesday November 12th - Singleton Center for the Arts
New York NY - Friday November 14th - Bowery Ballroom - SOLD OUT
New York NY - Saturday November 15th - Bowery Ballroom - SOLD OUT
New York NY - Sunday November 16th - Bowery Ballroom
London UK - Saturday November 22nd - Barbican - 1st show SOLD OUT, matinee show added
Bristol UK - Sunday November 23rd - The Prospect Building
Leeds UK - Monday November 24th - The Irish Centre
Helsinki FI - Tuesday January 20th - Tavastia
Stockholm SE - Wednesday January 21st - Fasching
Karlsruhe DE - Thursday January 22nd - Tollhaus
Lille FR - Friday January 23rd - Aeronef
Brussels BE - Saturday January 24th - Brussels Jazz Festival
Perugia IT - Sunday January 25th - Teatro del Pavone
Frankfurt DE - Monday January 26th - Zoom
Köln DE - Tuesday January 27th - Kantine
Paris FR - Wednesday January 28th - Le Trabendo
Berlin DE - Thursday January 29th - Großer Sendesaal des RBB
Dresden DE - Friday January 30th - Beatpol
Hamburg DE - Thursday April 9th - Kampnagel
Den Haag NL - Friday April 10th - Rewire Festival
Brugge BE - Saturday April 11th - Cactus Club
München DE - Sunday April 12th - Technikum
Salzburg AT - Monday April 13th - jazz:it
Graz AT - Tuesday April 14th - Orpheum
St. Gallen CH - Wednesday April 15th - Palace
Fribourg CH - Thursday April 16th - Fri-Son
Braga PT - Sunday April 19th - Theatro Circo
Lisboa PT - Monday April 20th - Culturgest
Ticket links at
https://www.trts.com/
...about Tortoise…
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.”
The band, which originally formed in Chicago, comprises Jeff Parker, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon, and John McEntire.
Initially hailed as pace-setters of the then-emerging, so-called “post-rock” sound, 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.
https://www.instagram.com/trts/?hl=en
https://www.facebook.com/TRTSband/
https://www.facebook.com/intlanthem/