Where are they? The weird, synthesized accents plastered all over a mess of a soundboard. The guitars looped ambiently into infinity and breakcore beats compressing and decompressing all of shoegaze’s history into a split second. Uncanny-to-replicate cuts and splices in song composition that time-shifts your focus in and out of nowhere. LOTTO is a totally different game from what we’ve come to known of the experimental ways of They Are Gutting A Body of Water, that’s for sure.

Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly as the Philly band’s most highest profile release to date — their first in tandem between frontman Doug Dulgarian’s Julia’s War label, the cassette imprint Smoking Room, and major indie ATO Records — heading into this moment with as much “structure” as one can expect from a band who has never quite aligned with convention is to be expected. Siphoning every eccentricity delivered in dreamscaped swaths of feedback against a grotesque canvas reflecting society and the self toward its core with a more muscular, heavier guitar-driven sound is what makes the underground darlings of shoegaze futurism’s big move so ready for the added ears and attention.

Fans of Dulgarian’s previous project, Jouska, will no doubt relish in aggression optimized while anyone who has been on this ride since their digital-only days of 2018 and have seen how far the sound they blazed has come in the scene at large realizes that if there’s to be anyone deserving to strike it big, it should be TAGABoW. We still get those glimmers of their signature sonic oddities bubble up in the occasional pitch-tuned vocal arrangement, electronic arrays, and sampled spoken word interludes. They can even seamlessly blend in a Fugazi instrumental into their own world. But akin to their creatively eccentric Philly peer, Alex G, and his recent major label turn, the band sounds at home resonating on the bigger stage (still positioned in the center of the room, of course) with their own respective fingerprints crushing heavy alternative rock under their own impression.

Highlights: “trainers”, “violence iii”, “american food”

They Are Gutting a Body of Water’s LOTTO is available now on ATO Records / Julia’s War / Smoking Room.

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