The ’90s sub-genre known as post-rock, much like electronica, has been so thoroughly absorbed into 21st century music that the term’s barely a punchline anymore. And to be sure, no band epitomized post-rock more than Tortoise. On a series of touchstone instrumental LPs, the Chicago outfit conducted rock and jazz ruminations via loop-based electronics, classical minimalism, film score landscapes, and bass-forward dub strategies. At its best, it was music-nerd tantra—body music for head people.

While Tortoise defined the pioneering (and still active) Thrill Jockey label, it’s worth noting that Touch, the band’s first release in 9 years, is their first for latter-day Chicago-born indie International Anthem, whose brand has been built in large part on jazz-forward iterations of Tortoise’s genre-dodging, which include fine solo LPs by the group’s journeyman guitarist, Jeff Parker. It’s fitting that those records, and Touch, are part of the label’s co-branding deal with Nonesuch Records, a mainstream boutique outpost of said genre-dodging since it released Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, a record that reflected the experimental Windy City scene Tortoise helped build. (Wilco would later concoct parts of A Ghost Is Born at Tortoise ringleader John McEntire’s Soma Studios and hire his versatile engineer, Mikael Jorgensen).

Even more than 2016’s The Catastrophist, an admirably off-brand song set with actual singers, Touch feels vexed, on-edge. Something called “Vexations” is in fact the lead track. A clipped and brittle mid-tempo rock groove, uncomfortably bright and metallic, downshifts to a warmer hip-hop stutter; an outsized surf figure is supplanted by a pas de deux for analog synth and a super-grimy guitar tone. When things finally settle down, Parker plays a gentle repeated figure over distant-thunder drums—conjuring the relief that comes when your dentist momentarily stops drilling, or you finally, mercifully, let the doomscroll screen go dark. The record is front-loaded with this serrated restlessness. “Layered Presence” sounds like mid-period King Crimson if they’d spent more time hanging with Kraftwerk. “Works and Days” recalls Oval’s glitchy groove science, bowing out on a funeral bass pulse amidst what sounds like field recordings—but who can tell what’s real or machine-sourced these days?

There’s a lot of dirt in the gears: distortion, static and other distressed sounds. That might be illustrative: The band members—Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Douglas McCombs, McEntire, and Parker, multi-instrumentalists all—have variously noted the album’s difficult, lengthy, sometimes frustrating creation. Logistics made it the first long-distance Tortoise album, one not centered on folks making music together in a room. There are moments you sense that detached process, an airlessness that flattens some details. It rarely lasts long: One instrument or another will make a grand gesture, or get punched up in the mix Lee Perry-style, pushed through a filter and/or into the red. The destructive energy in some of the creative decisions speak to the detachment of the recording process—a shouting over the transom—and it makes for a less comforting, more unstable record.

“Promenade à deux” finally eases into something like a classic Tortoise chill-out space, albeit with a more widescreen approach, uncharacteristically graced by viola and cello. From there, beginning with “A Title Comes,” the LP’s second half finds perfect balance between signal noise and cinematic sweep, with signature vibraphone pulses and swooning guitar progressions rubbing against blissed-out Terry Riley organ tones and motorik chug. The interstitial “Rated OG,” which might easily run double its length without losing steam, hurtles into a splatter groove, tag-teaming “Oganesson,” which maintains the propulsion, locking focus with a spidery bass line that ends with another plunge into gritty discord.

“Night Gang” is the big finale. It opens like an abstracted Shangri-Las ballad, but vocals never come. There are self-consciously anthemic synths and super-sized surf guitar that suggest David Lynch directing Ben-Hur, and the song goes out on a tease of lighters-up rock-god jamming just before the fade. It’s pretty funny, actually, and moving, too. You sense the in-jokes, the teenage pleasures dusted-off and sincerely lensed through distance and accrued wisdom. You feel the miles and styles these guys have traversed over 30-plus years of music making. And while the darkness of the record’s first half doesn’t get resolved, the frame has widened and you see the bigger picture. There’s some comfort in that.