Dig

Some songs announce their despair with a scream. "Dig" does something quieter and, in its way, more unsettling: it sinks. The second track on Nothing's debut album moves at the pace of someone wading through deep water, guitars piling up in slow, heavy layers while the voice floats above them, soft and almost unbothered. One reviewer called it sullen but melodic, a song whose dragging passages build toward a climax of stacked guitar parts^[2]. The title is a single blunt verb, and it sets the terms for everything that follows: this is music about going down into something, not climbing out of it.

To understand why a Philadelphia shoegaze band would make heaviness feel so personal, it helps to know who was making it.

A debut built from wreckage

Nothing is the project of Domenic Palermo, who came up in the city's hardcore scene and played in bands such as Horror Show before his life took a sharp turn. In 2002 he was jailed after a fight in which he stabbed someone, serving two years of a longer sentence on aggravated assault and attempted murder charges^[4][5]. Some of the lyrics on Guilty of Everything were reportedly written during that incarceration^[6].

Release brought no relief. Palermo has described coming home to family problems and to the deaths of two close childhood friends, then a long stretch of withdrawing into a room to read and write^[4][5]. He moved away for a year, found it was the opposite of what he needed, and returned to Philadelphia. There he started recording demos under the name Nothing and met guitarist Brandon Setta, who became his central collaborator^[4][5].

The album that grew out of those years was recorded in December 2012 at Uniform Recording in Philadelphia with producer Jeff Zeigler, and released on March 4, 2014 by Relapse Records, a label better known for metal^[1]. "Dig" arrived first, premiering on Stereogum on August 8, 2013, as the lead single^[1]. For many listeners it was the introduction to the band, and it still works as a compact statement of purpose.

Sound as meaning

Nothing is often filed under shoegaze, and the comparisons are fair. Critics reached for My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, the Smashing Pumpkins and Dinosaur Jr.^[1], and one reviewer heard debts to Slowdive and early shoegaze as well^[3]. But the band's roots in hardcore show in how the music is weighted. The guitars do not shimmer so much as press down. Where classic shoegaze often dissolves into bliss, this record keeps a hard knot of tension at its center.

That choice carries the song's emotional argument. A reviewer at Scene Point Blank described the record as being about despair and depression of the kind that comes from feeling like a failure, and noted that the band lands hardest when everything seems on the verge of collapse, much like a strong hardcore group^[3]. "Dig" illustrates this. Its tempo is patient, but nothing in it feels safe. The vocal harmonies sound gentle against a wall of distortion, and that contrast is where the unease lives.

There is a useful way to hear the gap between voice and guitars. The singing is detached, almost anesthetized, while the instruments carry the pressure. It resembles the experience of numbness, where feeling has not gone away but has been pushed somewhere you cannot reach directly. That reading of the song as numbness set to music fits the arrangement without needing any explicit statement.

Digging as a metaphor

A title like this invites several readings, and the song does not close any of them off.

The first is excavation. To dig is to go looking for something buried, and a man who spent years replaying his worst day, and then a decade of loss, has plenty buried. In this reading the song is an act of self-examination, a descent into memory that may or may not turn up anything redemptive. The album's title points the same way. Blabbermouth heard the whole record as a work of remorse, guilt, forgiveness and atonement, a kind of penance and a search for absolution^[2].

The second is entrenchment. People also dig in: they hold a position, sink down, refuse to move. Read this way, the song captures depression's gravity, the way staying put can feel like the only available option. The slowness of the track makes the case physically. You feel the weight of staying where you are.

The third is the grave. Digging is also what is done to bury something, and for a songwriter whose friends died while he was trying to rebuild his life, that association is hard to ignore. I would not claim the song is explicitly about any one event. But the shape of the music, with its slow descent and its heavy ending, is at least compatible with mourning.

None of these readings excludes the others. Palermo's own account of his work suggests a mind comfortable with ambiguity. He has said he wants the music to be heavy sonically and emotionally while revealing a hidden beauty inside that heaviness^[5], and he has named the nihilist essayist Emil Cioran, along with Dostoevsky, Camus, Genet and Artaud, as writers who helped him make sense of his restlessness, and whose ideas left him more at peace with who he is^[5].

Catharsis, not wallowing

It would be easy to hear a record this bleak as an exercise in self-pity. The reviews that loved it argued the opposite. Blabbermouth, which gave the album 9.5 out of 10, described it as speaking to listeners who are struggling with despair and need empathy^[2]. Scene Point Blank praised its ability to convey real pain and urgency without spelling it out^[3].

That restraint is part of why "Dig" works. It does not narrate a trauma for the audience or ask for sympathy. It builds a space where a heavy feeling can exist at full volume and be shared. Listeners who have lived through grief or depression often report that this kind of music is easier to bear than comforting words, because it does not pretend the weight is lighter than it is.

The band's origins reinforce the idea. Nothing began in the quiet of a room where Palermo was reading and writing after years of loss^[5]. Whether or not it fully worked as therapy (he later said the debut never gave him the fulfillment he had hoped for^[8]), the intention is audible. These are songs made by someone trying to put a name, or at least a sound, to something that had none.

Reception and legacy

Guilty of Everything earned a Metacritic score of 77 from 11 reviews, with scores such as 9/10 from Rock Sound and 6.9 from Pitchfork^[1]. It reached number 195 on the Billboard 200 and number 5 on the Heatseekers chart^[1]. Spin named it one of the best overlooked albums of 2014 so far, and the later single "Bent Nail" (with a video featuring Kurt Vile) landed on Rolling Stone's list of the year's best songs to that point^[1].

Not everyone was convinced. PopMatters argued that the record offered shockingly little beyond what was available by the mid-1990s^[7]. That is a fair criticism of the genre vocabulary, and a reasonable alternative way to hear "Dig": as a skilled, heartfelt reworking of familiar materials rather than a leap forward. The counterargument, which most fans would make, is that originality of sound matters less here than the sincerity behind it. Shoegaze has always been a language for feeling too much, and Nothing spoke it with unusual conviction.

The band's story also did not end with the debut. Palermo was badly assaulted on tour in Oakland in 2015, and doctors later told him he showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy^[6]. Later records would revisit instability and acceptance, with Palermo describing a perspective that was less combative and less self-blaming than before^[6]. Heard against that history, "Dig" sounds like an early chapter in a long effort to live with damage.

Why it lingers

There is also something instructive in where the song sits on the record. Placed second, it follows an opening track that sets a grim tone and comes before faster, sharper numbers, so it works as the point where the album slows down and lets the listener settle into its emotional register. One review of the album singled out the slower tracks, "Dig" and the title song, as more memorable than the quicker ones. That judgment seems right: the band is most itself when it lets a feeling take its time.

"Dig" resonates because it understands that some feelings cannot be solved, only inhabited. It gives the listener permission to sit inside heaviness without being rushed toward a resolution. The guitars rise, the voice stays soft, and the song ends not with an answer but with a more fully realized version of the question.

For anyone who has spent time at the bottom of something, whether guilt, grief or a long depression, that honesty is its own kind of comfort. The song does not promise a way out. It offers company on the way down, and sometimes that is the most useful thing a piece of music can do.