They Are Gutting a Body of Water: Lotto

The Philadelphia noise collective dials down the hyperreality and finds something startlingly human underneath.

Since their 2017 debut, They Are Gutting a Body of Water have built a world where shoegaze bleeds into breakcore and chaos turns tender at the edges. What began as Doug Dulgarian’s hazy, slowcore-adjacent solo project has evolved into a full-blown maximalist ensemble whose music sounds like a LAN party in purgatory—gleaming, overloaded, and strangely beautiful. Their previous albums were full of digital noise and feedback loops that felt like nostalgia reassembled through a cracked CRT screen. Live, they’d face each other in a circle, building a private storm.

On Lotto, the Philadelphia group flips the circuit breaker. It’s their most stripped-down record to date—less hyperactive simulation, more analog oxygen. The electronics and warped samples that once defined their sound give way to raw guitars, room tone, and the creak of real instruments. The result feels like waking from a fever dream, rubbing your eyes, and realizing the world outside is no less surreal.

Lyrically, Lotto peels away the filters too. Dulgarian’s writing has always hinted at alienation through impressionistic fragments, but here he comes into sharp focus. Opener “the chase” reads like a diary entry from the bottom of a withdrawal spiral: “Boosting Gillettes in a hopeful exchange for a sharp but tranqless synthetic isolate,” he murmurs, each syllable smudged but deliberate. The imagery is grotesque and intimate at once, his voice trembling just above the mix as if it might dissolve. On “rl stine,” a dedication to an unhoused friend, he sings, “I know that hurts / Greet the day with a sweet reserve,” a simple, disarming moment of empathy that lands like a bruise. The noise swells, but Dulgarian sounds more present than ever—less lost inside the distortion, more in conversation with it.

Despite the heaviness of its subject matter, Lotto pulses with life. It’s the most hopeful TAGABOW album not because it avoids despair, but because it stares it down. Dulgarian has called it “rife with perceivable mistakes,” and that imperfection is the point. The songs breathe, stumble, and course-correct in real time. On “slo crostic,” a late-album instrumental, the band plays with the looseness of an after-hours jam session: Emily Lofing’s bass curdles under PJ Carroll’s brittle guitar, while drummer Ben Opatut’s cymbals crash like traffic outside an open window. The groove builds slowly, awkwardly, until it finds a hook almost by accident—a small miracle of cohesion.

Closer “herpim” turns that fragility into parable. Over guitars that wail like sirens, Dulgarian narrates an emergency landing: “We couldn’t land where we intended ‘cause there’s storms / but now we have to, so I need you to buckle in.” As the instruments fade, a door creaks open—the sound of someone stepping into the unknown. The ending isn’t resolution; it’s acceptance.

Even as they move toward something rawer, Lotto doesn’t erase the band’s past lives. “chrises head” reanimates their love of synthetic texture, coating its guitars in glimmering, MIDI-like shimmer, while “baeside k” nods to the scuzzy brilliance of 2019’s Destiny XL. But the core of Lotto lies in its subtraction. By letting go of their pixelated maximalism, They Are Gutting a Body of Water uncover the ache that’s always driven them—the refusal to look away, even when the screen goes dark.

Lotto feels like a gamble that pays off: an album that trades spectacle for sensitivity, distortion for touch. Beneath the feedback and noise, there’s something tender humming—a reminder that sometimes the loudest act is learning to stay.