KOOL FAITH / LOOSIES II: 75 minutes of everything TAGABOW had lying around

KOOL FAITH / LOOSIES II is 29 tracks and 75 minutes of They Are Gutting a Body of Water emptying the drawer. The band calls it a mixtape, and it behaves like one: half-finished ideas, guest verses, interludes, sequenced as if the order mattered less than getting it out of the room. A few of these tracks are the best noisy pop this Philadelphia four have released. The rest is the residue of a band with too many open tabs.

TAGABOW began as Doug Dulgarian alone, a songwriter who grew up between Middletown, New York and North Jersey before landing in Philadelphia. The project became a band: bassist Emily Lofing, guitarist PJ Carroll, drummer Ben Opatut. The run is long and mostly good. They Are Gutting a Body of Water and sweater curse arrived as tapes in 2016 and 2017, gestures been followed in 2018, and Destiny XL in 2019 was recorded in a former house show venue in West Philadelphia and reissued two years later. The 2022 split An Insult to the Sport and the album lucky styles pushed them further, the visual album Expansion Pak landed in 2023, and a 2024 single, "Krillin", brought Greg Mendez and Sun Organ along. Then ATO Records, then LOTTO in 2025. Dulgarian also runs Julia's War Recordings, which has put out music from Feeble Little Horse, Wednesday and MJ Lenderman, and that label, with Smoking Room, is where this one lands.

KOOL FAITH / LOOSIES II is out October 16, 2026, on Julia's War Recordings and Smoking Room under exclusive license to ATO Records. It is a purge, everything Dulgarian had left over, and a party for the extended community the band has built.

The core guitar sound has not moved: a wall of it, thick enough to swallow a vocal. What has moved is what the band lets through the wall. Jungle, breakcore, drum 'n' bass and reggaeton run under the shoegaze now, and the short ambient and jungle interludes work as connective tissue. The record is dense in the way a room full of people is dense.

Six of the entries make the case. "rodman", with Hotline TNT, is the straight fuzz bomb, a chorus buried under six inches of pedal. "charter spec", with Horse Jumper of Love, pulls the opposite move: slow, hazed in the way early My Bloody Valentine was, pretty until it isn't. "5dime" is the oddball electro experiment, pinched drums and no patience. "the day the river flows backwards" sets spoken word against a beat and lets the voice carry the melody the guitars keep refusing. "yellow dolphins" is a glitched-out posse cut about pre-ordering GTA 6, which is either the funniest thing here or the most honest. And "a place where", with the Danish trio haloplus+, finds the sweet spot between dream pop and drum 'n' bass, the cleanest landing on the whole tape.

Spirit of the Beehive and the rapper RXKNephew both turn up, which tells you how wide the tent is: two names who share nothing except a host willing to put them on the same release.

This is for anyone who keeps Destiny XL and lucky styles in rotation, and for the Alex G and Spirit of the Beehive crowd who treat a label roster like a radio dial. It is for people who play a mixtape the way it was built, on shuffle, loud enough to hide the joins. Skip it if you want eleven songs and a thesis.

At 29 tracks and 75 minutes, though, the middle sags. Interludes that work early read as filler by the last third, and a few of the sketches are running on the idea alone. A mixtape earns the right to sprawl. It still has to justify the runtime, and this one runs about ten minutes past where the argument holds.

None of that undoes the good stretch. TAGABOW's whole project has been to stretch shoegaze until it holds everything they like: guitars, breakbeats, a rapper, a Danish dream pop trio, a joke about a video game pre-order. KOOL FAITH / LOOSIES II stretches furthest, and it is a 3.5. Loose where it should be tight, long where it should stop, and still worth the runtime for the songs that carry the rest.

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