PROTOMARTYR - Hotel Usona

Walking into “Hotel Usona” feels like slowly hearing a door close behind you. Joe Casey welcomes you to the hotel as if everything were already familiar, but listen closer and you'll realize this place is rotten from the inside. It's not just a concept album: it's a mental edifice, a nation transformed into corridors, rooms, guests and ghosts.

On their seventh album, Protomartyr (a band hailing from the Motor City, Detroit) take hold of America and picture it as an old hotel on the verge of collapse. Every room holds one of its sicknesses: the paralysis of modern life, artificial intelligence, deportation, twisted patriotism, violence, power, and the fear of having brought a child into all of this (right in the middle of making the album, Joe Casey and Alex Leonard became parents).
But the real surprise is that the band doesn't simply make their post-punk darker: they throw it wide open to so many different influences that it's no longer their defining genre. For this album, Protomartyr worked with Dave Fridmann (Mercury Rev) at Tarbox Studios. The trust built up over the records he's produced in the past (from Flaming Lips to MGMT, from Interpol to Mogwai and many others) allowed the band to push toward even more orchestral sounds. This latest work features far less guitar than its predecessors, along with an incredibly compelling sense of dynamics. Fridmann had already done something similar with the Flaming Lips' "The Soft Bulletin", a heavy-sounding record that didn't lean on the guitar at all. The result is an album where Alex's drums are often front and center, while Scott Davidson's bass keeps everything anchored. And then there are the horns: brass, sax, arrangements that bring in something Middle Eastern, exotic, almost cinematic.

“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” is the detonation: noisy, furious, almost toxic, with AI turned into a machine that chews up shit and spits just as much shit back out into the world.
“Third Country” sounds like it's come from some forgotten old film, while “Lavender – Gospel” opens up an unexpected crack: melancholy, enormous, almost sacred. Finally, “Checking Out” arrives just in time to leave the hotel with martial drums and a confession that weighs more than everything else.

“Hotel Usona” is extremely dense, anxious and often exhausting. But it's precisely this resistance to distracted listening that makes it essential among the latest autumn releases. Protomartyr offer no way out or welcoming place to stay, yet they hand you the keys to a room and turn their backs, vanishing into a maze of corridors. In the end we survived “Hotel California” fifty years ago (where we could check out but of course could never leave); maybe this time is the right one to start thinking about how to escape.

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02/10/2026