TAGABOW's LOTTO and NTS Performance: A Downward Spiral

Philadelphia shoegaze band, They Are Gutting A Body Of Water (referred to as TAGABOW for those in the know), the brainchild of frontman Douglas Dulgarian, released their latest album, LOTTO in October of 2025. Regretfully, the album did not make its way into my ears until about a week ago, but I have been overwhelmed with gratitude for it since. 

It is an album of nodded-out, burnt-out, waves of thick, maroon and caustic, green waste alchemized into a sweeter-than-sweet, artificial, nuclear flavor. The mournful, nostalgic relapse of LOTTO finds its home in the gut-wrenchingly bleak arrival of a future surrounded by decay. The post-awareness depression of arriving at the understanding and begrudging acceptance that the life you were sold as a kid no longer exists, and will likely never come to fruition. Whether you were desperately hoping to lock onto the rails of American Exceptionalism, or violently thrown off them after years or even decades. 

To wake up from your own self-induced coma and finally see all the rot around you, and debate with yourself if that same coma was truly a waste of time. An album of sitting with that and frantically scouring every drawer in your home for an escape from the correlative dread that arises, only for all of them to be empty. It is the ocean of despair and yearning for authentic joy and meaning that lies beneath all of today’s insufferable-yet-pleasurable irony and tongue-in-cheek self-loathing. 

This album is very directly about addiction and the trappings of its disease, but upon watching TAGABOW’s performance for NTS Radio, and the scrapyard backdrop, one can’t help but notice how these themes play into an allegory for the state of America today, and its ripple effects throughout global society. And I think it’s pretty clear that this thought process found a place to nestle inside of Douglas’ intent. The U.S. is its own form of vice after all. It practically runs on that truth. All cultures and convictions thrown into an industrial mixer to create a product that all of us can only partly identify with, but still derive a sort of strange, artificial-yet-immense pleasure and comfort from that actively encourages your addiction to it. Every new emerging demographic quickly capitalized on and thrown into the mixer with everything else.

LOTTO appears as a commentary or even a review of this product. Not at all spiteful, but almost as a closing round of applause for all that converged to make this ruin a reality; our society’s Titanic band performing as our great American ship drowns, and all the worlds that once felt so distinct colliding into the creation of a shared tragedy that is only as obscured as one’s awareness of the America that we are forced to find a home inside of. Almost every modern existential and bleak epiphany and their respective prescience finds an emotional pocket to reside in both LOTTO and TAGABOW’s NTS performance. To see the forest for its facades and faintly whimper every time you have to walk back inside of it to get your paycheck; repeating this sequence until it all eventually buckles under its own weight. 

So wake up, take whatever stimulant gets your heart beating fast enough to keep your eyes open and not crash your truck, and head to the scrapyard to watch the mechanisms that helped propel us into this dead future decay as they are gutted by you and your fellow mechanics; each plastic tube and car battery that’s pulled out representing the stalled machine heartbeat of what was once a symbol of hope and discovery, of which you are now scouring for parts to make a dime daily. There is no more to discover. Our footsteps and the litter we drag behind us have covered every speck of dirt and rock on this Earth. Every cleanup effort just leaves room for other litter to replace it, and every new development that’s reserved for those above your tax bracket eventually leaves behind the old; adding it to the pile of things for you to pick from. Day after day. 

Regards,

CEO