They Are Gutting a Body of Water have always operated in the murk between genres, usually dabbling in post-punk and shoegaze, but here they’ve dissolved the borders entirely, leaving only residue and shimmer, the afterimage of sound burned into your inner eyelids. LOTTO brings voices—or maybe several voices layered until they become a new species of utterance—speaking in syllables that feel ancient and invented simultaneously, a language your bones remember from before you had language at all. This is behind a chugging dirge of guitar-driven chaos.
Time on this album becomes like sticky taffy, stretching and snapping back. You’ll swear a track lasted three minutes or thirty; and both answers are correct. Melodies surface like half-remembered nursery rhymes heard through fever, familiar enough to unsettle, strange enough to hypnotize. And then there’s a wild Fugazi cover. Still, this is not a happy album, so use caution.
