NEW ALBUMS

TORTOISE

Touch INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM

Chicago’s post-rock pioneers return with what sounds like a comeback.

By Stephen Deusner

Tortoise: boisterous, brainy and sometimes poignant

8/10

IT’S only been nine years since Tortoise released their last album, but it feels a lot longer. The quintet were closely associated with the Chicago post-rock scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and when that scene ran its course, they seemed unmoored from their original context and anchored to something in the past. On 2016’s The Catastrophist they sounded like a band out of time, an impression bolstered by the fact that the album had been commissioned by the City of Chicago to highlight the scene that had birthed the band nearly 20 years prior. But they kept the subject matter at arm’s length, which made the music sound slick and cursory.

Now, in 2025, Tortoise have an all-new context. They are back in time, so to speak: their hometown has experienced a revival in its jazz and improvisational music scene, as a new generation of artists that includes Makaya McCraven, Angel Bat Dawid, Daniel Villarreal, Macie Stewart and many others have brought a forceful new voice to venues around town. In some cases they’ve even performed and recorded with members of Tortoise, guitarist Jeff Parker in particular. At the heart of this community is International Anthem Recording Co, the label that has released albums by all of those artists mentioned. Founded in 2014, it has helped to coalesce a new market for exploratory music that has more overlap with indie rock and experimental beats than with the traditional jazz scene.