Informal Proposals: Lotto by They Are Gutting a Body of Water

It’s a quirk of fate that shoegaze has seen such a resurgence decades after being largely abandoned by its main proponents. Perhaps the media were mostly to blame, pushing bands to look up from their pedalboards and lean into more alt-rock or Britpop affiliations in the mid-90s. Even so, it seemed they had reached the limits of their futuristic, innovative sounds back then. Though we’ve seen reunions and new material from veterans like Slowdive, Ride, Lush, and Swervedriver over the past decade, what distinguishes this reinvigoration is its embrace of fresh touches and new ingredients.

Well, it’s not exactly new to hear breaks, beats, and synth interludes seeping into guitar-driven dreampop or shoegaze. A.R. Kane, with their dub-smeared sensibilities, were already pioneers charting that terrain, and Seefeel’s Quique remains its most luminous form, with its effect-heavy guitars drowned in synth-fogs. Not to forget M83 Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts and mbv’s closer ‘wonder 2’, for more recent manifestations of this sampledelic electro-shoegaze strain.

It’s among the routes that have paved the way for Philadelphia’s recent shoegaze artists – or at least one of them. They’re a far cry from the classic American shoegaze sound. Medicine and Drop Nineteens come off too much like chord-driven college rock for them. Perhaps the hypnotic, hazy vibe of Bowery Electric and the chorus-drenched attacks of Swirlies come a little closer. Yet the Philly gazers are far more innovative, and, indeed, heavier.

They Are Gutting a Body of Water stand out as perhaps the most fully realised and sophisticated of the lot. The band, led by its creative core Douglas Dulgarian, have managed to fuse the noisiness of reverse-reverb effects and jungle breaks with the dark, heavy textures of contemporary shoegaze. And Lotto, their most recent outburst, might well be their greatest.

‘The Chase’, its opener and lead single, is a true testament to the band’s ingenuity. We can unmistakably recognise the influence of fellow Philadelphia natives, the long lost Blue Smiley and Alex G with his whims and disarming honesty. Here, Dulgarian turns toward spoken word, a more direct and accessible way of exploring intimate terrains. He speaks about the drug problems he’s been wrestling with since his teenage years – the same struggles that took Blue Smiley’s Brian Nowell too soon. At one point, those problems even damaged the nerves in Dulgarian’s left arm, briefly forcing him to rely more on digital instruments that he could play with one hand. Nevertheless, Lotto’s opening track heralds a record more rooted in guitars.

‘Sour Diesel’ is also proof of the band’s new modus operandi. While the vocals here curl back to their familiar smoggy timbre, the guitars push into a fresh, headbanging groove, no less heavy than before. As shoegaze aficionados, we’re all familiar with these super-dense wall-of-sound guitar chugs, and we might have regretted that they once seemed confined to Loveless. With They Are Gutting a Body of Water, and especially the first three pieces on Lotto, we can experience once again such weaponised guitars – perhaps even heavier. It’s a consolation for those of us – myself included – who have always craved refinement in sonic violence and sudden shifts in dynamics, yet didn’t find it in the wave of ‘blackgaze’ records from the mid-00s onwards.

Wasn’t this always the raison d’être of shoegaze, at least in the vein of My Bloody Valentine? Whatever the words, we’re here to make the most of distorted instrumentation and vapour-trail reverbs, and that’s precisely what They Are Gutting a Body of Water conjures in the middle section of Lotto. ‘Slo crostic’, with its introductory drum solo, a reminder of MBV’s ‘Who Sees You’, abandons vocals entirely to engulf us in bass-dominated instrumentation. ‘Baeside k’ also leans on gargantuan guitars with slower riffs, where those ethereal vocals return once more. In moments like these, Lotto upends the shoegaze tradition, not a gaze lost in memory, but one flickering with restlessness, anxiety, and distorted grace.

Philadelphia might be the new hub of the shoegaze revival in particular, and of the indie and DIY ethos in general. Some say it’s because of its low rents, and hopefully not because of the city’s high rate of drug addiction. Yet They Are Gutting a Body of Water are undoubtedly the perfect embodiment of this atmosphere, a fact that becomes clear even by watching them play live in bodegas and dive bars, with their backs to the crowd, and Dulgarian bent over his Roland sampler. The band testifies to their dedication to this anti-corporate spirit. Moreover, his own label, Julia’s War, has in its own right served as a launchpad for like-minded bands such as Her New Knife.

They Are Gutting a Body of Water’s artistry doesn’t end there. Expansion Pak, their 2023 release, came with a visual accompaniment entirely crafted by the band, further proving their aesthetic sensibilities in other domains, as can also be seen in the newer material released on YouTube for the singles from Lotto.

Shoegazing might be the counterpart in rock music to what Georges Bataille once formulated as the formless in philosophy. A significant part of 20th-century art has been considered in terms of formless, unmolded, and amorphous matter. And They Are Gutting a Body of Water’s work can be celebrated as one of its finest incarnations. With what they borrow from electronic music production techniques, they reach a sonic field where traditional structures dissolve into misty waves of samples and vocals.

The sound of Lotto offers little in the way of surprise for long-time followers of the band (though it may be a bit less hard-to-penetrate than previous recordings). This is immediately apparent on ‘violence iii’, a variation on a theme that first appeared in ‘violence i’ and ‘violence ii’ on previous albums Destiny XL and s, respectively. But I’m somewhat relieved that They Are Gutting a Body of Water haven’t simply given itself over to TikTok-gaze trends and glorified what forward-looking inventiveness in guitar music might be. From start to finish, as is clear on the closer, ‘herpim’ (one of my favorite tracks on the album), it’s evident that this is a band who are acutely aware of what their shoegazing sound should be. In a moment when “heavy shoegaze” is being reimagined by a new generation, Lotto shows how the genre can still evolve without dissolving into nostalgia, how weight and distortion can push it forward rather than backward. In that sense, They Are Gutting a Body of Water might just be its most blistering and luminous expression yet.