Hotel Usona: Protomartyr book a room in a rotting country

Hotel Usona is the record where Protomartyr stop sounding like a band about to fall apart and start sounding like one that already did the falling and kept playing. It is their seventh album, out on Domino, and the loudest and least minimal thing they have made: nine tracks, Dave Fridmann at the desk, Joe Casey walking the corridors of a country he has decided to call a hotel.

Protomartyr formed in Detroit in 2010: Casey on vocals, Greg Ahee on guitar, Scott Davidson on bass, Alex Leonard on drums. From No Passion All Technique in 2012 through Under Color of Official Right, The Agent Intellect and Relatives in Descent, they built a band that worked small and cold, holding the tension in the gap between what Casey said and what the guitars did around it. Ultimate Success Today was pushed from May to July of 2020 by the pandemic. Formal Growth in the Desert followed in 2023. Six albums of keeping the volume low so the pressure would show; this is where they let it out.

They recorded it in New York with Fridmann, who co-produced alongside Ahee. Fridmann's credits run through the Flaming Lips, MGMT and lately Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and he is good at making a big room feel wrong. Casey's conceit is America as an aging hotel, every room taken by a guest who will not leave, the hallways of the American Dream left to rot. Iggy Pop announced the record, called it "Wagnerian," and called the band "kind of like Jesus." Casey's own welcome is shorter and better: "Welcome back to the dream of a rotting mind."

Leonard is the story of this record. From the first bar of "The Old Hotel" the drums are doing the work other bands hand to a guitar line, and they never really stop. Ahee puts piano under the verses for shadow, plus found sounds and whatever else was in the room. Casey is still a baritone who talks more than he sings, but he sits closer to the front of the mix than he ever has, so the words land. A band that used to lean on what it left out is now playing with everything in.

"The Old Hotel" sets the pace at a walk while Casey snarls his welcome. Then "Sounds We Cannot Hear" opens the floor: it explodes into pummeling torrents, and Fridmann pushes them past the sulk they used to trade in. The lyric is about avoidance, the weight you cannot bear, the guilt you cannot feel, and the music refuses to let either one sit still. "Converts" is the shortest thing here and keeps the grip. "Exalted Eagles" goes industrial, cold air and machinery, the first moment the hotel stops being a metaphor and starts being a building.

Side two turns strange. "Feed the Sewer" comes down like a prophecy, noisy post-punk with Casey barking "INFORMATION DISEASE? FUTURE DREAMS?" and the record's interest in AI and information collapse showing through the floorboards. "The Knife Dream" is the best thing on it: horns credited to Jon Fridmann and piano arrive, and the track turns nightmarish and almost lounge, which should be a mess and is not. "Lavender Gospel" answers with saxophone blurts like a klaxon.

Then "Checking Out" takes seven minutes and forty-two seconds and hands Leonard the last word, freaking out on the drums while the guests empty the building. It is the only time here where the length is the point.

It sits next to late Nick Cave, the Flaming Lips at their most abrasive, and the Fall and Pere Ubu records Casey has said he likes. Come for the minimalism of Relatives in Descent and the width will read as excess. The looseness of the second half will lose you. Come because you have waited years for this band to stop holding back, and this is the payoff.

The flaw is the concept doing the arranging. Where the music is loud enough to drown the idea, on "Sounds We Cannot Hear" and "The Knife Dream," the hotel disappears and the songs stand up alone, which is the better result. Where it is not, you can hear a metaphor being ticked off, and "Third Country" drifts on atmosphere instead of finding a hook. A strong record with one badly furnished room, and the first Protomartyr album where the band is louder than the idea.

The tracklist

Hear it