Philadelphia’s They Are Gutting a Body of Water (TAGABOW) announce their new album, LOTTO, out October 17th via Julia’s War x Smoking Room x ATO Records, a North American tour, and release the new single/video, “trainers.” Haunting spoken-word vignettes hold a warped mirror up to modern life in small town America alongside menacing riffs, soaring leads and whaling distortion. The sound of TAGABOW is defiant. In a world of automated scam calls and AI content optimized to keep us scrolling, LOTTO is the sound of four human musicians in a room. The video for "trainers" can be streamed below.

TAGABOW began as the solo project of singer Doug Dulgarian, and is now a fully fleshed out band with bassist Emily Lofing, guitarist PJ Carroll, and drummer Ben Opatut. Dulgarian, the son of a dirt track racecar driver, grew up in the Hudson Valley before relocating to Albany for court-mandated rehab in 2010. Soon after getting clean in 2013, he attended his first house show. Inspired by this community of musicians self-releasing and organizing shows in makeshift spaces, he dove into DIY. “I chased that shit like I chased drugs,” he says. “Just being in a band—touring, playing awful fucking shows.”

Hailed by Stereogum as “the most important band in modern shoegaze,” TAGABOW made their name approaching the genre with an experimental edge. Over the years, their extensive DIY touring has earned them a cult following, with fans driving hours for shows and sneaking cell-phone pictures of their pedal boards. Their live show incorporates EDM interludes, drawing on influences like ’90s drum & bass and N64 soundtracks. They perform on the floor, purposely facing each other. No matter what chaos erupts in the mosh pit around them, TAGABOW looks inward. LOTTO is undoubtedly a live record on tape. A “touching of grass.”

With 2022’s Lucky Styles, TAGABOW leaned into stylistic collage, and on their next release, swanlike (loosies 2020 - 2023), continued down the path toward digital texture and manipulation. In writing LOTTO, Dulgarian challenged himself to put his guitar first. By abandoning digital technology and fully embracing the live-band format, LOTTO finds TAGABOW attempting to correct the course in a personal way. “In a world of perpetually increasing artifice, this record is my attempt to surface through the sea of false muck,” says Dulgarian. “It’s rife with perceivable mistakes, ebbing and flowing with the most humanity I can place on one record. The more I utilized [technology], the softer I got. I return again and again to that world because it’s more comfortable than my physical body. The dopamine flooding my brain. And in moments of clarity, I am often very aware that we’re currently watching the homogenization of art right before our very eyes. I am afraid that technology and convenience will cure the world of life.”

Following the “rapturous” (Paste) “american food,” “trainers” captures the energy that made TAGABOW a lynchpin of the American underground. The song contains a wall of fuzz under buzzing leads that spiral and sputter out into the ether. Dulgarian calls the song “a vignette, a day in the life; desiring something wholesome while still grappling with the reality presented clearly by my subconscious. I’ve built this life for myself, idealizing escape like we all do, I live in this house built on what I can only perceive to be bad decisions and shame, of comfort and distraction. walk to the store to buy some dumb thing that won’t help, after fantasizing about escaping it all. glance back at the comfort of my house and consider staying outside in the world tonight, because the escape isn’t big enough, it just never is.”