In the organizer's words:

Tortoise is considered one of the world's most influential music groups of the last 40 years with far-reaching influence on the contemporary music scene.

Take it from Pitchfork: "Imagine a graph showing all the bands the five members of Tortoise were in before they got together, and then all the bands they were in after. At the top of the funnel are groups ranging from dreamy psych-rock to earthy post-punk crunch, including Eleventh Dream Day, Bastro, Slint and the Poster Children; at the bottom of the 'post-Tortoise' line are groups that focus on electro-jazz and twangy instrumental rock, such as Isotope 217, Chicago Underground and Brokeback. In this graph, Tortoise is the bottleneck, the only project that contains elements of all of these sounds but never feels defined by or beholden to any of them. Instead, Tortoise floats freely, a planchette moving across a Ouija board, controlled by ten pairs of fingers, everyone watching as the arrow floats in one direction, but no one knowing exactly how it gets there or who nudges it."

At the time, the music press didn't really know what to call Tortoise's new music either and came up with the term "post-rock". Tortoise have only released seven albums since 1990 - including classics such as "Millions Now Living Will Never Die" (1996), "TNT" (1998) and "Standards" (2001). But the band has evolved steadily and intuitively over the course of their career, creating genre-bending music that is as timeless as it is ahead of its time.
So now the Tortoise are adding another milestone to their dazzling career: "Touch", their first album since 2016. It's no coincidence that "Touch" is being released on International Anthem (IARC), the state-of-the-art label from Chicago, and on Nonesuch Records. On "Touch", the Tortoise band members utilize their collectivist approach to songwriting, a slightly anarchistic but decidedly egalitarian process in which ideas triumph over ego and an abstract force emerges. While there are still forays into the dark, elegantly gnarly jazz ambience ("Millions Now Living Will Never Die" or "TNT"), "Touch" is perhaps most notable for the band's uncompromising devotion to the grand gesture. "Aerodynamically reworked krautrock, hand-twisted techno rave-ups and pointillist Italo-western fanfares are all imbued with Tortoise's now characteristic internal logic - enticing and confusing in equal measure, a puzzle to be savored rather than solved," says IARC in the press release for the new album.

And "live", Tortoise has always flourished in particular anyway, as the "New York Times" notes. The US "Rolling Stone" described the band as "a live marvel", while "Pitchfork" pointed out that Tortoise are also an "incredibly entertaining band": "At heart, they're a supremely fun band, wide open to all sorts of sonic possibilities."

After a few gigs in England in November 2025, including two long-sold-out shows at the legendary Barbican Centre, Tortoise will finally tour Europe again in January and April 2026, almost ten years after their last appearances. Further festival appearances and shows are planned for summer and fall 2026. 2026 - this should be a year of the turtle...
The band, which was originally formed in Chicago in 1990, consists of multi-instrumentalists Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Doug McCombs, John McEntire and Jeff Parker.
"This is about energy, pulse and a struggle with the unknown. (...) The music rocks for all it's worth (...) Sometimes you get the impression that a high-voltage cable is passing directly from the music to the listener's body." (Wolf Kampmann)

"When music was still daring. The avant-garde rock band Tortoise reminds us of how stylistically open pop could once be. (...) When the lights come back on, it's like landing back on earth after an eventful journey to another planet." (Philipp Krohn, FAZ)
"The quintet is in a great playing mood. The always inane label 'post-rock' fits less than ever today. Tortoise searches for an improvised music of the future with the help of the most diverse memories." (Jürgen Ziemer, Rolling Stone)