Protomartyr - Dissent and the inevitability of the end

The first steps

The earliest nucleus of Protomartyr took shape in Detroit when singer Joe Casey added his voice to the sonic experiments already being produced by the duo of Greg Ahee (guitar) and Alex Leonard (drums), who had been calling themselves Butt Babies. The name Protomartyr emerged in 2008, when the trio welcomed bassist (and second guitarist) Scott Davidson, after the four-string role had briefly been filled by Kevin Boyer, who soon decided to carry on his musical path with another punk outfit in the city he was already part of, Tyvek.
With this line-up, unchanged to this day, Protomartyr decided toward the end of 2011 to shut themselves in a studio to pin down their first fully-formed ideas, trying to put together at least an EP. They had just four hours to cram in a sonic burst everything they were capable of at that moment. The quartet came out with results well beyond expectations: a healthy haul of twenty-one songs, committed to physical format for the first time, built on a raw, guitar-heavy garage sound that immediately marked out their derivative yet distinctly personal approach.

Thirteen of those tracks surfaced a few months later on what became their official debut, No Passion All Technique, an openly self-mocking title, released by Detroit label Urinal Cake. The relentless riff of “In My Sphere” was chosen as our first gateway into their world, a world made of searing invectives (“Hot Wheel City”, “Call Me Out My Name”, “Bubba Helms”), blistering punk outbursts (“Free Supper”, “Wine Of Ape”), a few more melodic moments (“3 Swallows”) and forceful spoken-word passages that express what would become, over time, John Casey's distinctive and recognizable stream of consciousness (“Too Many Jewels”).
Standing out above the rest, and remaining among the band's most beloved compositions to this day, is “Jumbo's” (named after a bar located in midtown), a chiaroscuro piece that adds Sonic Youth-like streaks and wave-ish shadow to its Fall and Stooges reference points, defining almost completely the full range of Protomartyr's influences. Right behind it comes “How We Lived After He Died”, another passage directly traceable to the typical world of Thurston Moore and co.
No Passion All Technique, which quickly became impossible to find given the mere three hundred vinyl copies pressed at the time (on top of a few self-produced cassette versions distributed directly by the band), would be reissued in 2019 with four bonus tracks added, taken from that same four-hour session, which round out the sense of urgency running through those recordings.

Three of those four bonus tracks had actually already been released, again in 2012 on Urinal Cake, on a seven-inch built around a theme: portraits of perfect Michigan losers, Dreads 85 84, again limited to three hundred copies, the first hundred of which on pink vinyl. Material now strictly for collectors.
In the three songs it contains, “King Boots”, “Bubba Helms” and “Carter Eye Glasses”, Protomartyr confirm that, stylistically, they draw more from English post-punk, the Fall-Wire axis, than from their equally celebrated Detroit proto-punk forebears (see MC5 and Stooges), fellow Detroiters though they are: the influences that most strongly shape Casey and co.'s sound clearly come from the other side of the ocean.

Also in 2012, X! Records released a blazing four-track EP with the very Italian title Colpi Proibiti (“Forbidden Blows”), showing Protomartyr's most unabashedly punk-rock side.
In all, it's just seven minutes and fifty seconds, opening with the total devastation of “Baseball Bat” and continuing through the rapid-fire sequence of “You're With A Creep”-“The Milk Drinkers”-“Psychic Doorbell”. It remains the most incendiary release, musically speaking, in the entire catalogue of the Detroit quartet.

Two years later came their second album, Under Color Of Official Right, released by Hardly Art. Inevitably a more considered record, a collection of fairly short songs, some particularly brief and blunt (“Pagans”, “Son Of Dis”), which at times manage to preserve the same communicative urgency of the debut (the closing “I'll Take That Applause”).
Definitely to be seen as a transitional record, Under Color Of Official Right features devilish bass lines (“Ain't So Simple”), obsessive post-punk atmospheres (“Scum, Rise!”), guitar storms (“I Stare At Floors”), moments that might bring to mind Interpol (“Trust Me Billy”), but also smoother passages (“Come & See”, “Violent”) and a mindful nod toward a certain catchiness (“Want Remover”).

In April 2015 the previously unreleased sonic assault “Blues Festival” found a home on A Half Of Seven, a split shared with R.Ring.

Breaking through

But the record that truly began to change the course of things arrived in October of that same year, titled The Agent Intellect, through which Protomartyr aim to achieve the best possible synthesis between the raw garage-punk landscapes and the post-punk-noise snapshots they had produced up to that point, while at the same time finding a path toward a more “mature” formula and redefining their overall sound.
Across the twelve new songs, it's as if every facet of the band collides head-on, but through an even more exposed emotional tension. At the root of the new lyrics, after all, lie painful personal matters tied to the death of Casey's parents: his father, a victim of a heart attack in 2008 at age 72, and his mother, who soon after was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. The tone thus often turns more reflective than usual, while the musical parts take on the job of smoothing out tension and sharp edges, frequently turning the songs into powerful evocations built from circular rhythms and riffs, uniform vocal lines and lyrics that push right up to the edge of the soul, which in turn stretches the average song length.
The Joy Division-like hypnosis and tension of the single “Why Does It Shake?” is only a taste of what's to come. Further defining the contours of a situation both painful and threatening are, with mixed results, the polemical tightness of “Cowards Starve” (which unleashes bursts of electric fervor, placing the sound back on Fall-like coordinates, as do the pounding “Boyce Or Boice” and the raucous “The Hermit”), a sharper-edged “Uncle Mother's”, the Mission Of Burma toxins running through the tight chorus of “I Forgive You” and the garage regurgitations of “Dope Cloud”.
With “Pontiac 87” and “Ellen”, the frontman's inner traumas are touched even more directly: the former is a dense, desolate sonic shuffle that builds into an epic crescendo of buried rage, the latter, with its enveloping sweep, delivers genuine chills, picturing the father speaking to his wife at her grave. The dreamlike fade glimpsed repeatedly in “Clandestine Time” and in the dissonant “Feast Of Stephen” complete the picture that would launch Protomartyr's name onto the world stage.

On the back of the attention the quartet had drawn, a label change followed: in 2017 Domino was able to offer a more substantial budget and a greater deployment of resources, including promotional ones, to support what would become Protomartyr's political manifesto: Relatives In Descent. For the occasion, the band develop a post-punk that prefers subtlety, with evocative atmospheres and carefully crafted emotional dynamics, as well expressed in the superb “Night-Blooming Cereus”. Illuminating is the synthesis achieved in the anti-Trump masterpiece “A Private Understanding”, with a gait meant to foreshadow imminent danger, where the quieter moments (rendered in brief acoustic interludes) are the perfect device for making the surges that follow all the more explosive.
The bloodless analysis of America's present predicament, as well as the not-too-cryptic invectives against the President, are just some of the central themes in Casey's never-less-than-deep and demanding writing — a man with the charisma of someone who always has something cutting to say, and who, incidentally, plays an absolutely central role within the Protomartyr project: thanks to his baritone delivery, he makes the comparisons with Fall, Joy Division, the Birthday Party and early Interpol all the more inevitable, all masterfully evoked in the highly personal electric-funk vision realized across the scant three minutes of “Here Is The Thing”.
What's contained in Relatives In Descent is highly dangerous material, always ready to catch fire (“Male Plague”) or lurch into sudden detours (“My Children”), as dense with electric downpours (“Caitriona”, with guitars crossing Sonic Youth noise with the darkness of early Cure) as with drama (“Up The Tower”) and psychedelic instincts that first build and then let sonic walls explode (“Windsor Hum”). But beneath the layer of rubble and bladed assaults, melody can often be glimpsed, vivid and powerful, as happens in “The Chuckler” and “Don't Go To Anacita”. A nervy, tight record of rare power and effectiveness, in which the quartet even allows itself the indulgence of playing with words on famous, untouchable Zappa titles (“Corpses In Regalia”, with its pulsing bassline), proving it can rekindle the sacred fire of the most genuine, uncompromising alternative rock, in the face of anyone who still considers it outdated and nostalgic, with nothing left to say or show.

Confirmations

The Detroit band's state of grace was confirmed a year later with the release of four further tracks collected on the EP Consolation, in which, alongside the now-familiar nervy guitars, dizzying lyrics and vigorously electric atmosphere, we find, on two tracks, the vocal contribution of Kelley Deal of the Breeders, sister of the more famous Kim. The two-and-a-bit minutes of the devastating “Wait”, which opens the tracklist with real force, are venomous post-punk, just as the more melodic “Same Face In A Different Mirror” proves anything but reassuring.
This is subversive, furious music, underscored by six strings that seem ready to overflow at any moment, barely held within the mighty banks raised by the infernal rhythm section. Then Ms. Deal adds a touch of feminine grace to the following “Wheel Of Fortune”, chosen as the lead single, and “You Always Win”. Joe Casey, one of the most authoritative artistic outposts of anti-Trumpism, knows how to translate into music the whole climate of emergency gripping the United States (and beyond).
By the time it's over, you certainly won't find the longed-for “consolation” promised by the title — no, if anything you're left wrapped in a pervasive feeling of resignation.

Also in 2018, Protomartyr recorded two tracks in collaboration with Spray Paint, a band they've often toured with, collected on the 7-inch Irony Prompts A Party Rat, released by Monofonus Press. On “Corinthian Leather” Casey's voice settles over instrumental parts created by Spray Paint, while on “Bags And Cans” it's Protomartyr who come up with and play the backing track, with Spray Paint providing the vocals.

A few weeks later came a prestigious split with Preoccupations, Telemetry At Howe Bridge, on which each band tackles a cover of the other. Protomartyr record “Forbidden”, while Preoccupations take on “Pontiac 87”.

In the following months Kelley Deal took part, as an added member, in a number of dates on Preoccupations' tour; the band meanwhile began working on what would become their next album, originally slated for early 2020 but pushed back to mid-July due to the Coronavirus emergency. During the lockdown period, however, three tracks were doled out, keeping fans' and onlookers' expectations alive.

Having definitively shed the post-punk revivalist tag that was pinned on them a little too hastily in their early years, with Ultimate Success Today, released on July 17th, Protomartyr refine and diversify their personal stylistic mix, pushing to broaden their horizons. Even if a first, distracted listen might suggest little has changed from the past: the band's unmistakable trademarks remain Casey's voice, that deadpan drawl always ready to curdle and spit out apocalyptic pronouncements, and Ahee's guitar, which keeps pouring gasoline on the fire, here often backed by the agitated horns of guests Jemeel Moondoc and Izaak Mills, forming a diabolical wall of sound.
The Detroit quartet evolves, without any excessive leaps, and without losing an ounce of their by-now proverbial indignation against "the system", with those sonic charges that lend even more depth to Casey's lyrics, written as if they were the last lines of an existence unable to find a light at the end of the tunnel of a world inexorably adrift. Protomartyr confirm themselves as one of the most programmatically "against" bands on the American scene: firmly opposed to the US government, to multinational corporations, to the militarization of police forces, to the curbing of individual freedom, with more than a few lines that - though surely written before the pandemic, even if the first outbreaks in China may already have been known - reflect a state of emergency that is not just political and social, but also medical.
Among the probable causes of a hypothetical end of the world, listed amid the formidable riffs of "Processed By The Boys", is in fact also the "Foreign disease washed upon the beach": just a coincidence? A song that also touches on the control exerted by those in power over citizens' lives ("Fill out the forms/ download the app/submit your face into the scanner"). The sense of threat, of imminent danger, that has often accompanied Protomartyr's songs is tangible from the opening "Day Without End", a harrowing track that swells like a tsunami, enriched in its finale by Casey's delivery turning furious, and by the saxophone's overbearing advance.
A sharp, critical eye that observes and photographs, forever freezing the America of these difficult days, a highly determined approach that becomes even more sonic on "I Am You Now", closing an opening triptych built as a continuous crescendo with devastating emotional and psychological results. The protest keeps mounting, the reckoning is now just steps away ("Save your tears for the end of the show"), while up in the control rooms certainties keep slipping away ("Shut your mouth/ you're starting to lose focus").
Going full throttle, continuing to stoke the fire, would become unbearable for the listener, so two gentler tracks follow: "The Aphorist", led by piano, and "June 21", where the soothing female voice of Nandi Rose (Half Waif) steps in. But the guitars are always ready to slash through the canvas with blasts of electricity, like the sharp, decisive cut across a Fontana painting, and the rhythm section rarely allows itself a moment of reassuring calm, with the cello contributions (courtesy of the other special guest, Fred Lonberg-Holm) almost imperceptible beneath the sonic magma produced.
The second half of the record makes room for the clattering "Michigan Hammers", a snapshot focused on their home turf (the lyrics reference a historical episode from which the cover image can be interpreted), a "Tranquilizer" that rests for long stretches on the sensual nakedness of bass and saxophone, the alt-rock adrenaline of "Modern Business Hymns" and the menacing march of "Bridge & Crown".
The sudden back-and-forth between dissent and the inevitability of the end leaves one fearing (hard to imagine this being the band's desired effect) that any effort to overturn the state of things is doomed to collapse, to crumble. After the last known hero, will there be another one ready to pick up the torch? The sense of an ending ("So it's time to say goodbye"), of fading away, is sealed by the tragic introspection of "Worm In Heaven", the best ballad the band has recorded to date, closing the circle by speaking of post-mortem oblivion ("Remember me how I lived/ I was frightened").
Will the "day without end" declaimed in the album's first song be the one in which we fall asleep forever? Or could it, far more simply, be the day set for the next US presidential election? Whether Trump wins or loses, the future of America, and the meaning of these ten songs, could end up being diametrically opposed.

As if the pandemic weren't enough, frontman Joe Casey was struck in the following months by a painful family bereavement, and the lyrics he wrote during this difficult period reflect all the anguish of the moment. This is the material that would go into Formal Growth In The Desert, released at the start of June 2023, a bleak snapshot of those recent months. The title and content both speak of deserts, inner and emotional ones. Alongside Casey, there's the usual heavy lifting done on guitars by Greg Ahee, who as co-producer also steers the musical choices, proving himself perfectly attuned to turning the frontman's declaimed reflections into music.
Formal Growth In The Desert is a more varied work than usual, at times melodic - as melodic as Protomartyr could ever be perceived to be - and the compositions, hard to pin down under the reductive post-punk label, show indie-rock leanings in several places ("For Tomorrow") while never giving up a certain "punk" attitude ("Fun In Hi Skool"). All of it filed under the grim, heavy mood that has always set them apart.
The rhythmic work of Alex Leonard and Scott Davidson certainly has no intention of leaving behind the funereal, apocalyptic terrain typical of the Protomartyr sound ("Let's Tip The Creator"), while Casey, delivering some of the best vocal performances of his career, never misses a chance to scream out choruses, tearing through three years of silence with rage ("3800 Tigers").
Running times stay contained throughout, in songs of great intensity. A sixth chapter that opens the door to hints of change, showing a band still brimming with inspiration. Alongside the release of the new album, the first tour dates were announced, which during 2023 will take the band across stages in North America and Europe.

Three years on, Protomartyr return with Hotel Usona (2026), a new chapter that marks a further evolution of their sound. Produced by Dave Fridmann, the record partly sets aside guitars to embrace more orchestral, cinematic arrangements, with horns and keyboards building a dense, claustrophobic atmosphere. The concept imagines America as a decaying old hotel, where every room houses a contemporary ailment: from modern-day paralysis to artificial intelligence, from deportation to the fear of raising a child in such a world (Casey and Leonard became parents during the recording sessions).
"The Old Hotel" opens the doors with a sickly, deeply mournful calm, before "Sounds We Cannot Hear" arrives to grip you by the throat. "Converts" then turns the tension into a kind of broken dance, while "The Knife Dream" sinks into a nightmare of whispers, piano and unresolved crescendos. "Feed The Sewer", on the other hand, is the detonation: noisy, furious, almost toxic, with AI turned into a machine that chews up shit and spits the same shit back out at the world.
"Third Country" seems to come from some long-forgotten old film, while "Lavender - Gospel" opens up an unexpected crack: melancholic, enormous, almost sacred. Finally, "Checking Out" arrives just in time to check out of the hotel with a martial drumbeat and a confession that weighs more than everything else.
An anxious, demanding work that confirms the Detroit band as one of the sharpest and most necessary voices on the alternative scene.

(Thanks to Francesco Nunziata for his valuable contributions on "The Agent Intellect" and to Ljós Berinn for "Hotel Usona")

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google