Chicago Trio Twin Talk Finds Joy in the Unexpected on Delights, Out Now on Shifting Paradigm Records
The long-running collective of Dustin Laurenzi, Katie Ernst and Andrew Green channels fifteen years of musical chemistry into an intricate, spontaneous and deeply playful new recording following recent appearances at Big Ears Festival and the Chicago Jazz Festival.
November 6, 2026 – Shifting Paradigm Records is pleased to announce Delights, the fifth studio album from Chicago trio Twin Talk, available now. Featuring tenor saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi, bassist and vocalist Katie Ernst, and drummer Andrew Green, Delights captures a band approaching fifteen years together with its collective language more elastic, intuitive and distinctive than ever. Across eleven original compositions, the trio embraces intricacy without sacrificing immediacy, creating music whose unpredictable turns are animated by a persistent sense of joy.
The album’s title is affably tongue-in-cheek, but it’s not wrong. Delights may suggest a breezy collection of delectable melodies, yet Twin Talk has never been interested in taking the most obvious route from one musical idea to another. Instead, Laurenzi, Ernst and Green build pieces through constant conversation, allowing composed material to open naturally into improvisation and then coalesce again in unexpected ways. The resulting music can be knotty, spacious, lyrical or bracing, often within the same piece, while retaining the unmistakable identity of three musicians who have spent more than a decade learning how to anticipate and surprise one another.
That chemistry has been forged through years of performing together. All three members maintain busy careers within and beyond Chicago’s creative music community: Laurenzi tours with singer-songwriter Bill Callahan, Ernst performs in the touring band of Iron & Wine, and Green is a fixture of Chicago’s indie and jazz scenes. Twin Talk, however, has become a musical home of its own. The group treats live performance as an opportunity to stretch, frequently abandoning predetermined set lists and calling tunes on the fly. That same sense of possibility permeates Delights. Following recent performances at the Big Ears Festival and Chicago Jazz Festival, the trio also just performed the world premiere of Delights at Jazzfest Berlin in Germany.
As on the group’s 2024 release Twin Talk Live, Laurenzi composed the majority of the album’s material. Opener “Red Cent” immediately establishes a more bracing side of his tenor sound, its fire playing against Ernst’s pointed bass accents and Green’s sensitivity to open space. “Heavy Nice” finds Laurenzi navigating startling turnarounds as Ernst and Green lean into a dynamic, elastic groove. Elsewhere, the easygoing surface of “Super Official” becomes a setting for Green’s subtly disruptive responses, demonstrating how naturally the trio can complicate a musical idea without overwhelming it.
Ernst’s compositions reveal another dimension of the group. On “Northwest,” her voice enters with unabashed warmth, bringing a sense of soft power to the trio’s spacious interaction. “Shadow Kid” moves toward the intersection of jazz and contemporary chamber music, contrasting Ernst’s ethereal vocal presence with Laurenzi’s lower-register tenor and Green’s determined attack. Green’s compact “Mississippi,” meanwhile, gives way to the short, shifting phrases of “Both And,” a knotty miniature whose unpredictable changes showcase the trio’s precision without diminishing its sense of play.
Throughout Delights, complexity functions less as an end in itself than as fuel for interaction. Twin Talk’s compositions provide structures that can be inhabited, challenged and reshaped in real time, allowing each musician to move fluidly between foreground and background. By the culminating “Similar Grit,” the album’s contrasting qualities have become inseparable: delicacy and force, composition and improvisation, individual expression and collective instinct.
Recorded with engineer Steve Shirk, whose attention to sonic detail also distinguished Twin Talk Live, Delights captures the immediacy of the trio without flattening its subtleties. Every bass resonance, tenor texture and percussive detail contributes to the sense of three musicians occupying the same musical space and reacting in the moment.
Nearly fifteen years into their life as a band, Twin Talk arrives at Delights not by settling into a formula, but by continuing to open the music outward. The album reflects a collective that has become increasingly comfortable with contradiction: rigorous yet loose, intricate yet inviting, understated yet capable of sudden intensity. For all of its twists and turns, Delights lives up to its name, finding pleasure not in predictability, but in the ongoing possibilities of musical conversation.