Since 2017, They Are Gutting a Body of Water have evolved from Doug Dulgarian’s shoegazey, slowcore-influenced solo project into a dense, maximalist quartet that can best be described as the soundtrack to a hypothetical Mario Kart Level of Hell. The band’s fusion of drum ’n’ bass and breakcore with harsh, dense layers of guitar and bass is often accompanied by rounded, N64-inspired tones, creating a world both playful and sinister in its embrace of the synthetic. Their sound feels massive yet insular in its precision: During live sets, they prefer to play facing each other in a tight circle. On Lotto, TAGABOW’s fourth studio album, the band pulls the plug on hyperreality and abandons electronic elements in favor of a more straightforward, live approach: finally letting the screens go black, pulling the blinds up. It’s their rawest album yet, both in subject matter and in sound.
Though Dulgarian has previously delved into themes of numbness and isolation, the lyrics have tended to be evasive, allowing his terse, imagistic motifs to slip quietly beneath the crashing riffs. Lotto strips his words bare from the jump. The album opens with “the chase,” a first-person account of suffering through fentanyl withdrawal. “Boosting Gillettes in a hopeful exchange for a sharp but tranqless synthetic isolate,” he mutters, “a substance that’ll make me sob pathetic to my girlfriend up high in miracle’s castle.” Even when the lyrics are fuzzier and sparser, Dulgarian’s voice comes through clearer than ever. On “rl stine,” dedicated to an unhoused friend, he allows certain phrases to come to the forefront of speaker-busting guitar swells: “I know that hurts/Greet the day with a sweet reserve.” Lotto’s vignettes become all the more gut-wrenching in their pointed swings toward clarity.
Still, Lotto is not a pessimistic album; it’s the band’s most hopeful work, in both its brutal honesty and its conscious pursuit of staying grounded. Dulgarian notes that the album is “rife with perceivable mistakes, ebbing and flowing with the most humanity [he] can place on one record.” This sentiment was always present in TAGABOW’s music (“Evolve, or die,” he sang on 2022’s “webmaster”), but it comes alive in these pared-back arrangements. On the instrumental standout “slo crostic,” Dulgarian, bassist Emily Lofing, and guitarist PJ Carroll each take turns riffing off Ben Opatut’s walloping drums before coming together into a relatively simple yet undeniably hooky finish. It feels unrehearsed, or at least looser and more laid-back than ever. Closer “herpim” explores the band’s new steadfast approach with lyrics that describe an airplane emergency over ambulance-like guitars and a looming, hoarse bassline. “We couldn’t land where we intended ‘cause there’s storms,” Dulgarian announces through loudspeaker fuzz, “but now we have to so I need you to buckle in.” The instruments fade out one by one, concluding the album with a few muted drums and the sound of a door opening.
It feels less like a happy ending than a steadfast commitment to finding new territory. That’s not to say that TAGABOW have abandoned the sounds that first made them connect; the guitars on instrumental “chrises head” adopt the band’s synth interlude skins for old time’s sake, and “baeside k” evokes the classic scuzz of 2019’s destiny XL. But for the most part, Lotto gambles on TAGABOW’s ability to craft songs more compelling in their simplicity and vulnerability than their technical capabilities. By trading in their plastic sheen for a more ragged sense of real-life urgency, TAGABOW expose the tenderness at their music’s core: a refusal to anesthetize, an avowal to meet the bone where it breaks.
