Early Album Listening Event
Tortoise, the legendary Chicago post-rock innovators, are back and celebrating the launch of their first album since 2016 with global listening events
After more than thirty years in the business, pioneering a hypnotic blend of indie-rock, electronica, jazz and motorik krautrock grooves, their latest release arrives via International Anthem and Nonesuch Records.
Join us at Badlands for an exclusive early playback of Touch a week before its release, and three weeks before it hits streaming services. As an exclusive benefit for this event, attendees will be able to take home the album on CD or vinyl ahead of the official release date on the 24th of October!
18th Oct. 2025
Playback from 4pm until close
In-store at Badlands
Tortoise - 'Touch'
Tortoise announces Touch, the first new album from the groundbreaking group since 2016.
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.
With Touch, the Tortoise bandmembers — 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.