Tortoise are covering new ground

“We’re always trying to make the most interesting thing we can,” Doug McCombs says. “We figure if it’s interesting to us, it will probably be interesting to someone else. That’s the only thing we think about when we write and play as a group.”

Since co-founding the instrumental quintet Tortoise in Chicago in 1990, McCombs and his band have attracted a slew of descriptors – “interesting” among them – for their genre-hopping, amorphous sound. Variously labelled “pioneers of post-rock”, “anti-grunge” and even “post-prog”, the group’s seven albums since 1994’s self-titled debut have encompassed everything from synth experimentation to 20-minute, groove-shifting odysseys, jazz improvisation, dub bass, krautrock drums, polyrhythmic guitar picking and yearning, emotive melody. An influence on bands like Squid and Moin, drummer Makaya McCraven and the avant-jazz musician Anna Butterss, Tortoise have crafted a soundscape that leaves space not just for guitar distortion but for a meticulous confluence of electronic and acoustic instrumentation, a sense of structure poised on the verge of cacophony and chaos.

Read the feature in Crack Magazine.

[This piece was published on 16/12/25]