Protomartyr
Protomartyr
The room was Tarbox Road Studios in western New York, and the man running it was Dave Fridmann, the producer behind records by Sleater-Kinney, MGMT and The Flaming Lips. That is where Protomartyr made Hotel Usona, their seventh full-length album, which is out today on Domino.
The Detroit band have not answered the moment with a louder record. They have made a more contemplative one: nine songs built around a single conceit, in which singer Joe Casey imagines his country as an ageing hotel and gives each song a room of its own.
A Hotel With Nine Rooms
According to Domino’s announcement, each room is haunted by its own troublesome guest. The label’s notes set out the occupants: the slow paralysis of modern life in “Sounds We Cannot Hear”, AI in “Feed the Sewer”, deportation in “Third Country”, warped patriotism in “Exalted Eagles”, violence in “The Knife Dream”, JD Vance in “Converts”, and, in “Checking Out”, what the label calls the often unbearable weight of becoming a father anyway.
The label describes the album as a hard look at a nation in free fall. The Line of Best Fit took the metaphor further, picturing a damp, soon-to-be-foreclosed building whose management no longer cares about the radiators, the mould or the leaks, where the guests have checked in so long ago they no longer remember arriving.
By the review’s account, this is the first Protomartyr record that truly lives inside the apocalypse the band have always written about: not a world of noise and terror, not even a nation or a city, but a smoky room. It is more concerned with the people slipping away within its walls than with how everyone got there. “Protomartyr aren’t seeking answers; those are obvious by now,” the critic writes.
The running order, as published by Consequence, is “The Old Hotel”, “Sounds We Cannot Hear”, “Converts”, “Exalted Eagles”, “The Knife Dream”, “Feed the Sewer”, “Lavender – Gospel”, “Third Country” and “Checking Out”.
What Dave Fridmann Changed
In the past, The Line of Best Fit notes, the band’s setup prioritised minimalism: Alex Leonard’s stripped-back drums and Scott Davidson’s churning bass setting the stage for Casey’s musings and Greg Ahee’s guitar architecture. The review argues that Fridmann did not change that sound so much as expand it, sometimes pushing songs until they breach the atmosphere and more often loosening the band up for atmospheric pieces.
The biggest addition, by the review’s account, is the saxophone, which haunts the songs and gives them a noirish heft, recasting Casey as a weary detective at the hotel bar. It runs from the breakdown of opener “The Old Hotel” to the close of “Converts” and the back of “Lavender – Gospel”. Domino credits Fridmann’s son, Jon, with the horns. Ahee, who co-produced, drew new influence from the Middle East and 1950s exotica, according to the label.
The result, in The Line of Best Fit’s reading, is a record that is remarkably contemplative and lush. The label credits Fridmann with making all of it, and Leonard’s drumming in particular, “more tangible and terrifying”, and says the band have never sounded more powerful. The review goes further, concluding that Hotel Usona is the band’s best work in over a decade.
The Songs That Hit Hardest
Not everything is subdued. “Feed the Sewer”, with its machine-gun drums and slamming bass line, might be the hardest track the band have ever written, the review says. “Exalted Eagles” merges industrial rock with creeping samba rhythms into something the review calls an imperial death march, while “Third Country” folds a 1950s waltz and a girl-group drumbeat into what it describes as haunting hypnagogia. “The Knife Dream” sits somewhere between trip hop and dark jazz, with a piano that lays down what the review calls “twinkles of suspense like rain on a hot tin roof”.
Pieces of old exotica and balladry sit alongside noise and tension, which the review says turns the band’s post-punk into “a vessel for something older and stranger”. Sometimes the album moves as a single mournful ballad; at other times, the critic writes, it feels like a radio signal broadcasting folk song from a future soon to come.
The review hears lead single “Sounds We Cannot Hear” as classic Protomartyr: moody verses building to choruses that Fridmann makes massive, with Ahee’s guitar taking on psychedelic qualities. Its opening line, “The scroll deforms the day”, sets the tone for a song Domino describes as being about the slow paralysis of modern life. The video stars the internet comedian Nate Varrone, whose credits include The Bear.
Casey’s lyrics, the review adds, are hypermodern, touching on AI and “crypto ballrooms” alongside character studies of finance bros. Since the announcement, Domino has also released “Feed the Sewer”, with a video, and “Exalted Eagles” as singles.
Iggy Pop Makes the Case
Iggy Pop wrote a letter about the album, published alongside the announcement. He described Protomartyr as “a kind of rock band out of Detroit”, adding: “That’s a subject I know something about.” The new record, he wrote, “is highly themed and symphonic in its reach.”
“I could call it a kind of drive-through Sgt. Peppers, but that would miss the mark,” he continued. “This record is Wagnerian, it reminds me very much of the Opera Tristan and Isolde.”
Musically, he wrote, the album “sounds modal, and kind of chromatic, like I imagine Celtic war horns might sound in some forgotten battle.” He wrote that Casey “is blessed with a beautiful voice that you want to listen to, but he stays perverse enough to keep things interesting”, and that the four players “can shift rhythms and harmonics very, very smoothly in a way that seems effortless.” In his words: “It’s the mark of fine arts in a popular group.”
One of his favourite moments, he wrote, is when Casey “simply announces, all alone, ‘We got a bad review.'” What follows, in his telling, is a furious outpouring from the entire group. He also called the band “a slow growth item, something that is gaining followers, listeners, and respect little by little, over the long haul.”
Two Decades, Four Players
Domino introduces the band as “preeminent prophets of societal decline” and says of the new album: “It is not easy listening. It’s essential.” Protomartyr are vocalist Joe Casey, drummer Alex Leonard, bassist Scott Davidson and guitarist, multi-instrumentalist and co-producer Greg Ahee. Hotel Usona follows 2023’s Formal Growth in the Desert, and The Line of Best Fit notes it is the band’s fourth album for Domino.
Over the last two decades, the label says, they have built their body of work by veering in and out of darkness and grappling with what frightens, saddens, disgusts and enrages people, with a gallows humour running through it. On stages worldwide, the review notes, Casey has “swaggered as little as possible while dripping softly spoken bile into the microphone”. The Line of Best Fit calls his writing “too obtuse to be conversational yet too precise to be pretentious” and the least changed element of the band, but hears it here as “more spectral than concrete: less stories, more messages”.
Post-punk’s long-serving bands have been busy this season. Earlier this month, BestRock.News reported that Echo & the Bunnymen lost Clem Burke before Apples for Isaac was done.
The Tour Ahead
Protomartyr take the record on the road from 19 October at the Crescent Ballroom in Phoenix. The North American run includes the Regent in Los Angeles on 22 October, a date at the Far Out Lounge in Austin on 31 October with the Jesus and Mary Chain, Webster Hall in New York on 12 November and the Metro in Chicago on 19 November, before a hometown show at the Majestic in Detroit on 4 December. Accessory support on the October dates from Phoenix to Portland, and J.R.C.G. on most of the November run from Toronto to Chicago.
A UK and European run follows in February 2027, starting at the Irish Centre in Leeds on 11 February and taking in Glasgow, Manchester and Bristol before Electric Brixton in London on 16 February. It continues through Lille, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Berlin and Leipzig, ending at Meet Factory in Prague on 28 February.
For a band that made its name on tension, Hotel Usona is a patient record. Protomartyr have let the rooms speak for themselves.
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