Protomartyr - Ultimate Success Today

Protomartyr have always sounded suspicious of the future. On Ultimate Success Today, the future seems to have finally arrived, and it is every bit as bleak, absurd, and strangely beautiful as they feared.

Released in 2020 on Domino, Ultimate Success Today is the Detroit band’s fifth studio album and the follow-up to 2017’s Relatives in Descent. Written before the upheavals that defined 2020, its visions of institutional decay, environmental collapse, illness, and social fragmentation proved eerily well timed. Yet Protomartyr avoid straightforward protest music. Joe Casey’s writing remains oblique, literary, funny, and deeply human, finding small moments of dignity amid larger systems falling apart.

Musically, the band expands well beyond the conventional boundaries of post-punk. Greg Ahee’s guitar moves between wiry abrasion and enormous atmospheric passages while Scott Davidson and Alex Leonard maintain the tense rhythmic foundation underneath. Saxophone, clarinet, cello, and additional vocals widen the palette further, giving the album a richer and occasionally more unsettling character than its predecessors.

The opening “Day Without End” slowly gathers pressure before “Processed By The Boys” turns bureaucratic dread into one of the band’s most immediate songs. “Michigan Hammers” hits with considerably more force, while “The Aphorist” and “Tranquilizer” demonstrate how effectively Protomartyr can make anxiety feel both cerebral and physical. The album eventually reaches “Worm in Heaven,” a remarkable closing meditation on mortality and disappearance that replaces easy catharsis with something far more haunting.

That combination of intellect and physicality is central to Protomartyr. Casey may deliver his observations with the weary cadence of someone documenting civilization from a barstool, but the band behind him can erupt without warning, transforming resignation into noise, tension, and momentum.

Ultimate Success Today is a record about endings made by a band operating at full strength: acerbic, atmospheric, confrontational, and unexpectedly moving, with some of Protomartyr’s darkest observations surrounded by their most expansive music.