Protomartyr - Hotel Usona

Recorded with legendary producer Dave Fridmann (Nick Cave, MGMT, The Flaming Lips) at his own Tarbox Road Studios in western New York, Hotel Usona—Protomartyr's seventh full-length studio album—is an effort that finds the Detroit post-punk outfit reckoning with the horrors of our current moment. It is not easy listening.

Over the last two decades, Protomartyr—vocalist Joe Casey, drummer Alex Leonard, bassist Scott Davidson, guitarist-multi-instrumentalist and co-producer Greg Ahee—have built one of the most rewarding and often exhilarating bodies of work in recent memory by veering in and out of darkness, grappling with what most frightens us, saddens us, disgusts us, embarrasses and enrages us. The stuff that makes us human.

Casey has imagined his country as an aging hotel here, each song a room haunted by its own troublesome guest: the slow paralysis of modern life (“Sounds We Cannot Hear”), AI (“Feed the Sewer”), deportation (“Third Country”), warped patriotism (“Exalted Eagles”), violence (“The Knife Dream”), JD Vance (“Converts”), and the often unbearable weight of becoming a father anyway (“Checking Out”). It’s a hard look at a nation in free fall, gripped by fascism.

Musically, Ahee has built worlds within a world, drawing new influence from the Middle East and ‘50s exotica, finding common ground between dread and joy, a speciality. All of it—Leonard’s drumming in particular—is rendered more tangible and terrifying by Fridmann, whose son, Jon, contributes horns. You can feel the stakes in every song, feel the band levitating to meet them. They’ve never sounded more powerful.