Daiana Feuer on December 4th, 2015

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Tortoise returns with “The Catastrophist,” their first album since 2009. Since forming in 1990, multi-instrumentalists Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Doug McCombs, John McEntire and Jeff Parker have delivered instrumental soundscapes that pull at will from electronica, dub, jazz, minimalism, rock and more unnamed ideas, and their sixth album promises to follow that open plan. There’s talk of hypnotic beats and bass, moody synths, and even a “downright strange” cover of David Essex’s 1973 hit, “Rock On,” sung by U.S. Maple/Dead Rider’s Todd Rittmann, and a soul tune featuring Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley.

The first single, “Gesceap,” is a wild one. It begins with synths doing battle in a way that’s reminiscent of getting stuck on a hard level of a video game. The fuzzy bass pushes its way in, followed by the drums, which seem to crawl out from beneath the mounting tension like a creature emerging from under a rock. “To a certain extent it’s more of a reflection of how we actually sound when we play live,” says McEntire. The song actually came about after a commission by the City of Chicago in 2010, to compose a suite of music inspired by their hometown’s storied jazz and improvised music heritage. Tortoise performed five loose themes at a few concerts, and “when we finally got around to talking about a new record, the obvious solution to begin with was to take those pieces and see what else we could do with them,” says McEntire. They restructured them and made them even more complex, in Tortoise fashion, and “Gesceap” was the first result. The album will be released Jan. 22, but if you pre-order from Thrill Jockey, you get a T-shirt designed by John Herndon. You know you want one.

||| Stream: “Gesceap”