According to Tauk guitarist Matt Jalbert, the Long Island, New York-based four-piece never actually planned on being an all-instrumental band. Rather, the idea arose organically. He explains, “Originally we were thinking, ‘Let’s find a singer that really fits what we do.’ While we were going through that process we would get together to write and play music. and at some point we said, ‘Wait a second — this kind of sounds good as it is.’ We discovered we really liked the freedom and challenge of not having a vocalist.”
Over the course of their career, Tauk have certainly continued to challenge themselves and their growing audience. The band blends rock, jazz, fusion, prog, funk, electronic elements and whatever else captures their imagination into a spacey, jammy stew, and their newest full-length, Shapeshifter II: Outbreak, finds them furthering those cosmic explorations. The new record picks up on the narrative thread of their 2018 EP, Shapeshifter I: Construct, which saw the band tackling the idea of artificial intelligence. It’s a concept that, Jalbert says, “is such an open-ended thing and is creating all these possibilities around us. It seemed like a fun thing to dive into.” Of course, he adds, “The narrative is very loose, because we’re an instrumental band. But for us it was just a cool way to put the music into a different context.”
