Tortoise

Among the most stylistically prescient indie bands to emerge in the ’90s, Tortoise exert an influence far beyond the sphere of impressionistic instrumental rock that they helped invent. Their genre-agnostic sensibility has affected the sound of jazz, electronic music, hip-hop, crossover classical music, and more—all styles that helped inspire the group’s sound initially. The band developed in Chicago in the early ’90s out of the partnership between bassist Doug McCombs and drummer John Herndon. The ensemble expanded to include another bassist and two other drummers for their iconoclastic debut album (1993’s Tortoise) and drew increasingly from influences outside of rock—dub and electronic music, primarily—on 1996’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die. On 1998’s elaborate studio collage TNT, they added guitarist Jeff Parker, cementing their trademark “post-rock” sound, inflected by marimbas and vibraphones. The 2000s saw the band experiment with unconventional production techniques and branch out into collaborating with other artists (The Ex, Bonnie “Prince” Billy); they incorporated vocalists for the first time on 2016’s The Catastrophist. Since the release of that album, the members of the ensemble have made rich contributions to a variety of styles, as seen in Parker’s work as a jazz bandleader, drummer John McEntire’s extensive résumé as an indie-rock sideman, and elsewhere.