Hi, everyone. Checkthony Intano here, the intranet's busiest music nerd. And it's time for a review of the new Protomartyr album, Hotel Usona.

This is the latest and seventh full-length album to come from one of the sturdiest and most consistent groups to break out of the Detroit underground in the 2010s, Protomartyr. They had a really impressive run of albums and an unbroken lineup of members through that decade. Really five whole records with heavy post-punk leanings, topped with dramatic, super expressive lead vocals from frontman Joe Casey, whose range and delivery sometimes kind of veer between a Nick Cave or a Jarvis Cocker.

Many other comparisons can be made, but certainly he has formulated his own distinct style over the years. The guitar work and rhythm section on any given Protomartyr track can run either pretty moody or visceral, depending on the tune, too. It's a very simple but effective approach that has worked on multiple career highlights, including Relatives in Descent, as well as The Agent Intellect.

However, I will say, at least from my own personal perspective, the band's sound has kind of lost a bit of novelty and excitement over the years, especially with their last full-length LP, Formal Growth in the Desert, which did have some highlights on it for sure, but was maybe their most predictable release yet. However, I think Hotel Usona brings maybe just the switch-up that the band has been needing at this point in their career.

In a recent interview with yours truly, they confirmed that this album, at least in part, was conceived separately, but then they teamed up together with super producer Dave Fridmann, who has helmed some pretty grandiose statements from the likes of Mercury Rev, as well as the Flaming Lips. And he definitely helped Protomartyr here create what I think is their most ornately arranged album yet, because while there are plenty of guitar passages to be had on these tracks, there are many more moments in Hotel Usona's runtime where it's the pianos, it's the strings, it's the horns that are really taking the lead, and also helping to enhance the pain, anguish, and desperation that typically comes through in Joe Casey's vocal performances.

It's also worth noting this is definitely the band's most political and conceptual album yet lyrically, with pretty much every track on this LP taking inspiration from or addressing a different urgent topic, but always doing so with enough nuance so that it doesn't feel like you're listening to a dissertation or reading an article.

The track "Sounds We Cannot Hear", for example, which was a single to the record, reads to me like the description of a hollow, everyday existence. Grinding away against these everyday horrors, images of war, oppression, injustice, and experiencing a certain deafness or feeling a powerlessness in the face of that. And I should also say, as a part of this concept, the point is to take all of these disparate ideas and bring them together in a place, in a location, a figurative hotel of sorts. I mean, the opening moments of the album describe the imagined hotel itself:

"Welcome back to the dream of a rotten mind / the rooms are half empty / the hallways are where you'll survive / the boys in the hotel are slovenly drunk on the job / their promise of gentle discernment expired."

Which, of course, is set to weepy horn passages and thunderous floor tom beats. And these same sorts of references to a sense of place are threaded throughout other tracks on the album, like "Exalted Eagles":

"We got a bad review / the act of violence was an aberration / if it was up to you, would you stay with us again?"

With deeper bars on this track, I think it clearly plays as a satire on some nationalist supremacist mindset, with a really grim militaristic finish for the end of the song. Other tracks, though, pull more power, or at least try to, from subtlety, like "Converts," with its gentle, spacey, kind of odd rhythm guitar sections that never quite settle into a sensible groove on the verses, and kind of lead into a sort of low-key B section that's maybe the most underwhelming on the record.

"The Knife Dream," though, by comparison, is a much more powerful number, and somehow reaches a really immense peak toward the finish, despite having a very winding progression. Between the woodwind and string passages, Joe Casey sings lines like, " It's waiting in the walls," against this patient drumbeat in addition to these tell-them refrains and soaring guitars that end the entire track off; each section is more cinematic than the last.

Another highlight on this record is the following "Feed the Sewer," which is really one of the heaviest, most heavy and crushing and immense songs the band has ever put out. Between the slow, snarling, bassy riffs and pounding drums, it's one of the band's most industrial-type tracks. And these hideous sounds contrast really well with an absolutely beautiful bridge that's packed with even more arrangements.

Right after this, we pretty much head into the final moments on the album. It's worth noting we have a pretty trimmed tracklist of nine songs on this thing, even though the record does have a nice, hefty 45-minute runtime. Clearly, Protomartyr is putting more eggs in fewer baskets, in a way. But for a record like this, where maybe you really want those grandiose orchestrations to have time to build and really leave an impression on the audience, that's probably not a bad move.

The track "Lavender – Gospel" makes great use of these arrangements and a lot of space around them, setting them to chilling poetry of the horrors of modern warfare, modern war crimes, with Joe Casey singing:

"Something is being born / there's something hovering in the sky / made by man / it's crying like a child / its tears are white phosphorus / sets the air alight."

And then adding an AI component to that as well, saying: "The machine is thinking with no reason, no cause, no guilt, no touch."

"Third country" also leans heavily into that Dave Fridmann production, really going into art and Baroque rock territory, I would say. And though it does have a very airy, spacious, beautiful beginning, it does eventually reach this finale where we get hit with these dense walls of sound, set to a very grim and sinister chord progression.

And it's interesting, in terms of the overall progression of this record, this to me almost feels like the finale, the big ending moment, not so much the closer "Checking Out", which is the long longest track on the record at seven minutes, but does not feel as grandiose as some of the bigger moments previous to it. I would say it's more anticlimactic than anything, but purposefully so, though it does have a very interesting winding progression where we do hear a return of some of those orchestrations that have enhanced the record so far.

This track maybe reaches the saddest, most low-key, most hollow, most inconclusive finish of any song here, but I would say that lines up with the lyrics of this track pretty well because this album, because none of the problems or issues it's addressing are resolved in any way, there's not really anywhere, I think, for this record to go philosophically other than toward a place of disorientation, disillusionment, in a sense, anyway.

I mean, the track does start with a lot of piss and vinegar and kind of gets into the idea of "checking out" as a sort of rejection of the modern order that the Hotel Usona is built around. It's kind of saying that escaping the hell being painted on this record, isn't even a full solution or reprieve from what's going on. Which, of course it isn't, but I digress.

Because, as on the money and as compelling as the narrative and a lot of the lyrical points of this record are, let me not emphasize that over what is the band's best-produced and arranged album so far. A record that does a fantastic job of balancing between these hauntingly beautiful and hideously menacing moments and ties all of it together really well into an album flow that's pretty cinematic.

Now, there are some moments where I feel like the band's ambitions around kind of building these tracks up into these linear and epic progressions get away from them a little bit because not every finale or third act on these songs hits. But I still think Hotel Usona is the best thing Protomartyr has put out in a long time. Which is why I'm feeling a light eight on this one.

Anthony Fantano. Protomartyr. Forever.