“You ever go through a whole period of your life and then you look back and be like, damn, that was so cool, I wish I was still there?”
They Are Gutting a Body of Water vocalist and lyricist Douglas Dulgarian is standing in an empty field by an abandoned industrial area outside of Philadelphia as he asks me this question. The rest of the Philly-based rock band — drummer Ben Opatut, bassist Emily Lofing, and guitarist PJ Carroll — are here, too, in a circle formation among the overgrowth of weeds and grass, the Delaware River stretched before us. There’s the occasional rumble of cargo trains charging across the bridge above us, but otherwise, we’re the only people around.
“There’s that Sheryl Crow lyric about wanting what you’ve got that’s so poignant and real,” Dulgarian continues. “A lot of LOTTO is about never being satisfied, just to realize I’ve always had what I needed.”
Brian Karlsson
We are here because Dulgarian rejected the idea that we do this interview at a diner or café (“You can’t have meaningful conversations in public places,” he said), so I found myself in the band’s tour van — Dulgarian driving, Carroll in the front seat, and Lofing beside me while Opatut follows behind — heading 30 minutes north from their rehearsal space in south Philly to an outdoor rave space that Dulgarian recently played. (“It’s sick,” they assure me.) As we drove to the site, Dulgarian pointed out the houses of various friends within the Philly D.I.Y. scene. There seemed to be a familiar home every few blocks.
On “Soak Up the Sun,” the song Dulgarian is referencing, Crow tries to find meaning and fulfillment in the life she already has instead of falling for an idealistic, unattainable fantasy molded by capitalism: “It’s not having what you want/ It’s wanting what you’ve got,” she sings. On LOTTO, the new album from They Are Gutting A Body of Water, also known as TAGABOW, out October 17, there are echoes of that message as Dulgarian sings with candor about the collapse of American society and its decay at the hands of consumerism and greed, of exploitation and poverty. He questions his own complacency as an active participant in a system designed to punish and isolate, and reflects on his own struggles with substance abuse, addiction, and his ongoing recovery. It contains some of the most straightforward guitar songs in their discography, designed to evoke the raw essence of their fearsome live shows, as TAGABOW fully embraces being a capital-R Rock band. Notably Dulgarian, whose band is known for its unhinged, twisted take on shoegaze, no longer drenches his vocals with reverb.
“I think this record was a practice in being truthful. It’s so easy to hide behind layers of shit,” Dulgarian says. “What is the truth of what we’re doing, when we’re not hiding behind aesthetics and whatever else?”
As Philly D.I.Y. scene stalwarts, TAGABOW began in 2017 as a project between Dulgarian and Opatut. They built fully realized sonic worlds by combining guitar music with drum and bass, breakcore, and jungle. Joined later by Lofing and Carroll, the band’s digitally-damaged shoegaze on albums Destiny XL and Lucky Styles served as a framework for modern rock music in the Northeast and beyond. Dulgarian, who heads Julia’s War, the tastemaking label behind records by Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, and feeble little horse, has inspired a new crop of young shoegaze bands who take the TAGABOW blueprint and freestyle with it; Hotline TNT’s Will Anderson has referred to Julia’s War as the “Headquarters of Northeast Shoegaze,” and dedicated a song to the label on their latest album, Raspberry Moon.
In the close-knit independent music community where shows are glorified friend hangouts — “One of the only ways that I get socialization,” Dulgarian remarks — TAGABOW are known for their signature circle formation where they play facing each other with their backs turned to the crowd, harnessing a special intensity. This past summer, the band embarked on their first tour outside of North America to play shows across the U.K. and Europe. Their steady rise as respected cult figures coincides with LOTTO being their first record to be released on the venerated N.Y.C. label ATO Records, and the first time they’ll embark on a headline tour on their own terms: They plan to build a one-foot stage in the middle of every venue.
Brian Karlsson
“We just want this to feel like a record where we are all playing in the same room,” Dulgarian says of LOTTO, which was primarily conceived for this purpose. In 2024, the band began sending demos back and forth; Dulgarian wrote his vocal parts last. Unlike on previous records, where Dulgarian would tinker over the tracks and inject them with an artificial, glitchy dissonance, these songs are stripped back with loud guitars and hooky riffs destined to live deep within your skull.
TAGABOW have always sung from a cynic’s vantage point of the world ending, but for this new album they “wanted to bring it back to some real world music,” as opposed to the more artificial themes of lucky styles. That began with observing the city around them, as well as “the truth in myself.”
“I’m talking about American culture and the predatory nature of it, but I’m also talking about my fucking inclination to engage in that shit. Lottery tickets are so predatory and represent a real dark desire in all of us to get ahead without being true and honest in our work,” Dulgarian says, explaining the impetus behind the album’s title.
A lot of LOTTO is about never being satisfied, just to realize I’ve always had what I needed.
“Predatory” is a word Dulgarian uses often in our conversation. It’s how he describes capitalism’s corrosive effect on human nature, the way our minds are corrupted by greed and seduced by the possibility of shortcuts. He sees it everywhere in Philly, stricken with poverty and an opioid crisis; in 2023, the city recorded 1,310 deaths from unintentional drug overdose, 80% of which involved fentanyl. “It’s just in your face all the time,” he says.
This topic is also personal. When we meet, Dulgarian, who has been in ongoing opioid recovery for over a decade, is eight months sober. On LOTTO, he describes going through fentanyl withdrawal on New Year’s Day by way of confessional monologue as the music cascades and sways through his spoken word. “I finally feel the comforting, familiar feeling of potential sleep rising up through the bile in my throat,” he says bitterly on “the chase.” By the end of the song, Dulgarian is pondering death while being met with the loving gaze of Lofing, who’s also his partner: “Like the addict in the street, using against their own will, refusing to die, yet determined to, and to which one will I say ‘I love you’? To which one will I say ‘I need you or I’m gonna fucking die’?”
“I used to think that all art came from pain and that’s bullshit,” he says. “Art is a catalyst for anything that you fucking want it to be. One of the big things on this record is that there is hope… that you can choose those things. You can choose shallow, temporary reliefs from life to feel better, or you can just feel how you have to feel and get through that fucking thing.”
The cover of LOTTO, out October 17 via ATO Records.
Elsewhere on the record, on “trainers,” Dulgarian coins the phrase “Disney bread,” the cartoonish rendering of a fantasy food item sold by capitalism that will never be as satisfying in reality. (“Nothing will ever taste as good as it looks in the fucking movie.”) It’s a criticism that Dulgarian also directs at himself on the record, questioning when his “thirst for stardom is going to overstep the bounds of the art itself, when I’m trying to make things that I think people want?” he wonders. But then you hear songs like “rl stine,” about a man Dulgarian sees daily and to whom he gives a pack of Newports with the understanding that they will be traded for crack. It’s most evocative of the band’s deeply empathetic nature. Dulgarian knows the kind of person he sees himself in, and you get the sense he won’t lose that anytime soon.
As the band enters their new globe-trotting chapter, Dulgarian keeps one weary eye on the capitalist-spurring behind this kind of expansion. “It’s a very American way of thinking where you have to want more and not realize that you’ve had quite a lucky experience in life.”
While their headline tour kicks off on October 30, Dulgarian and co are happy to keep performing at smaller clubs where they can still be one with the crowd. “It’s an experience. You’re next to me. You can smell how bad I stink from being on tour for 14 days. You know what I mean?” Dulgarian says, before once again repeating that poignant refrain.
“I just want to be happy with what we got.”
