They Are Gutting a Body of Water

They Are Gutting a Body of Water — often abbreviated TAGABOW — is a Philadelphia band operating inside the contemporary shoegaze and dream-pop revival. The project is emblematic of a wider movement that has been working out, very slowly and very seriously, what shoegaze sounds like when the people making it grew up with hip-hop and not with My Bloody Valentine as the first-order reference point. The shoegaze revival of the 2020s is distinct from the 90s original. The texture is there — the walls of distorted guitar, the distant vocals, the hypnotic loops — but the rhythm is different. There is often more space. The production leaves more room for silence. The guitars borrow from emo and from slowcore as much as they borrow from the canonical British shoegaze bands. Philadelphia specifically has become an unlikely capital of this movement. A whole cluster of bands working in adjacent sounds, sharing bills, sharing audiences. This is the thing you cannot fake: scenes happen when groups of people are in rooms together. The internet helps the work travel, but the work gets made at the house show. Nonesuch indexes TAGABOW because they belong to a lineage that is, genuinely, the most interesting American guitar music of the decade.