THEY ARE GUTTING A BODY OF WATER - Lotto

Launched in 2017 as the solo project of Douglas Dulgarian, the TAGABOW idea (an acronym for They Are Gutting A Body Of Water) has evolved into a quartet featuring bassist Emily Lofing, guitarist PJ Carroll and drummer Ben Opatut. After plenty of time paying dues, their fourth album – "Lotto" – finally has everything it takes to be their breakthrough record. It's a work built on effects-laden guitars that look decisively toward the experience of DIIV, chewing over the style of the great names of shoegaze, and riding the moment when "shoegaze" became a TikTok trend, thanks to those comforting sounds that no longer belong only to kids from the Nineties, but to those of the 2020s too.

From Philadelphia, the same city as Nothing, Douglas Dulgarian tells stories of heroin, isolation and endless attempts at getting clean, with anguished lyrics and cutting guitars. Nu-gaze blended with a fair dose of electronics, out of necessity as much as anything, since an injury kept Douglas from playing guitar for a while, forcing him to dabble in sampling and loops, giving rise (unwittingly?) to a kind of electro-shoegaze. Call it "sampledelica" if you like.

Reverb, delay, Nintendo and drum'n'bass, but the heart of the matter remains the buzzing, mosquito-like guitars very much in the vein of Smashing Pumpkins on "The Chase", where Douglas uses a spoken-word delivery with a Mogwai/post-rock flavour to recount in the first person the suffering caused by fentanyl withdrawal. Even if "rl stine" turns out decidedly Corgan-oriented (at times recalling "Mayonaise") and "Violence III" shows grungy veins, the picture on the nightstand is without a shadow of a doubt that of My Bloody Valentine, evoked both by the ethereal voices of "Baeside K", which attempt to recreate the same atmospheres as "Only Shallow", and by the instrumental "Slow Crostic", the illegitimate offspring of "Who Sees You".

This isn't nostalgia, but rather the desire to draw inspiration from those sounds to create something new, reinventing it for the use and enjoyment of new generations. We dance for 27 minutes with his demons, but Douglas is actually far more proactive than he'd have us believe: he also runs the label Julia's War, which is home not only to "Lotto" but also to artists like Wednesday and Feeble Little Horse, making him one of the quiet architects of the new American underground.

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29/10/2025