After nearly fifteen years of making music together, Chicago trio Twin Talk has reached a point where anticipation and surprise have become part of the same musical instinct. On Delights, the group’s fifth studio album, tenor saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi, bassist and vocalist Katie Ernst, and drummer Andrew Green turn years of shared experience into music that is intricate, spontaneous, deeply intuitive and, above all, playful.
Due November 6, 2026 via Shifting Paradigm Records, Delights features eleven original compositions that showcase a trio with an exceptionally developed collective language. The music can be lyrical and spacious one moment, knotty and bracing the next, but even at its most complex it retains a sense of movement and discovery.
The title is deliberately understated, even slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it captures something essential about the album. Twin Talk has never been a band interested in following the most predictable path through a composition. Instead, Laurenzi, Ernst and Green treat their written material as an invitation to interact, improvise and react to one another in real time.
That approach has been cultivated over years of playing together. While each musician maintains an active career outside the trio — Laurenzi tours with singer-songwriter Bill Callahan, Ernst performs with Iron & Wine, and Green is deeply embedded in Chicago’s indie and jazz communities — Twin Talk has developed into a musical home for all three.
Their live performances are known for embracing uncertainty, with the trio often abandoning fixed set lists and calling tunes on the fly. Recent appearances at Big Ears Festival and the Chicago Jazz Festival have further demonstrated the group’s ability to make spontaneous decisions feel completely natural. That spirit continues with a performance at Jazzfest Berlin on November 1, where Delights will receive its world premiere, just days before the album’s official release.
As with the group’s 2024 album Twin Talk Live, Laurenzi wrote the majority of the material on Delights. The opening track, “Red Cent,” immediately reveals a more forceful side of his tenor playing, with its intensity balanced by Ernst’s sharply defined bass work and Green’s instinctive use of space.
“Heavy Nice” pushes the trio into an elastic groove, with Laurenzi navigating unexpected turns while Ernst and Green constantly adjust the rhythmic landscape beneath him. On “Super Official,” meanwhile, an initially relaxed surface becomes something more unpredictable as Green introduces subtle disruptions that encourage the other musicians to rethink the material around him.
Ernst’s compositions bring another shade to the record. Her voice adds a striking warmth to “Northwest,” where the trio creates a spacious environment that allows the vocal performance to become another instrumental colour. “Shadow Kid” ventures further toward contemporary chamber music, combining Ernst’s ethereal vocals with Laurenzi’s low-register tenor and Green’s insistent drumming.
Green contributes the compact “Mississippi,” followed by “Both And,” a short but intricate piece built around shifting phrases and sudden changes. The track demonstrates just how precisely the three musicians can operate together without allowing that precision to become rigid.
Throughout Delights, complexity is never treated simply as a technical achievement. Instead, it becomes a mechanism for conversation. The compositions establish frameworks that the musicians can inhabit, stretch and reshape, constantly moving between individual statements and collective responses.
That balance becomes especially apparent as the album approaches its conclusion with “Similar Grit.” By this point, the distinctions between delicacy and intensity, composition and improvisation, restraint and expression have largely dissolved. What remains is the sound of three musicians responding to one another with the confidence that comes from years of shared musical experience.
The album was recorded with engineer Steve Shirk, whose work also helped shape the sound of Twin Talk Live. His recording captures the trio’s immediacy while preserving the fine details that make their music so engaging. Bass resonance, saxophone texture and individual percussion sounds remain clearly defined, creating the sensation of being in the room as the music unfolds.
That immediacy is crucial to Twin Talk’s identity. The trio’s music depends not only on what has been written, but on what happens between the musicians once the composition begins. Each player has enough understanding of the others to predict where the music might go, but enough individuality to derail those expectations.
It is that combination of familiarity and unpredictability that makes Delights so compelling. Nearly fifteen years into their collaboration, Twin Talk have not settled into a formula. Instead, they have used their accumulated chemistry to make the music more open.
The result is a record that is rigorous without feeling academic, spontaneous without feeling unfocused, and sophisticated without losing its sense of fun. Delights finds its energy in the unexpected — in the moments when three musicians who know each other extremely well still manage to surprise one another.
Twin Talk will perform at the Sound & Gravity Festival in Chicago on September 6, followed by the Delights world premiere at Jazzfest Berlin on November 1. A Chicago record release show is scheduled for November 13, with a performance at ROZZ-TOX in Rock Island, Illinois, on November 14.
Delights by Twin Talk will be released November 6, 2026 via Shifting Paradigm Records.
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