Detroit post-punk quartet Protomartyr unveil the reality of the modern American idiosyncrasy with sheer mastery of wit, indignation, and heart on Hotel Usona.
Release date: September 25, 2026 | Domino Recording Company | Official Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Facebook
‘The natural impatience of a citizen of the United States at the idea of the word American referring to any one except himself and his fellow citizens choked off any chance of life the expression Usona might have had at that time.‘
The quote above reflects an initiative that dates back to the early 20th century to exercise the acronym USONA, or the United States of North America, as an alternate name for the United States. This was proposed to avoid referring the country as America and, in turn, give proper nomenclatural representation to Mexico and Canada with its usage.
Two centuries later, the U.S.’s perceived possession of the term America is something that its public servants have been protecting with a rabidness that’s teetering towards the bizarre through the likes of Gulf of America and Lake America – a testament to the embarrassing relevancy of such a statement.
Hotel Usona is Protomartyr‘s way of shining a spotlight on the self-imposed protagonism of a nation that has devolved into a pompous caricature of itself. Fittingly, the post-punk Detroit act conceptualized their seventh full-length record as a hotel whose opulent facades bear no resemblance to its crooked rooms. ‘Welcome back to the dream of a rotten mind‘ begins the album as you check in to it on “The Old Hotel”, reciting a dreadful snapshot of the United States where the drums march towards an infectiously jagged beat of toms and hi-hat, thrashing onto drunkenly morose horn sections that accentuate the accustomed anguish but nonetheless ire and irony coming from the vocals. These musical stylings would further develop and define the rest of the record in a manner that constantly challenges and impresses: it’s carefully ornate for a Protomartyr record, but the power it holds does not go unstated.
For the newly initiated, this one can be quite a heavy listen as the album’s pacing is built with all the intention of making the fervor bubbling beneath each note and line that much palpable. “The Knife Dream” is one that immediately comes to mind due to its haunting sound design that feels borderline multi-sensorial, subjecting you to a feverish and gut-wrenching illustration of innocence being stripped away by the over-exposure of violence. Social media has become a huge contributor to this, raising a class of netizens completely desensitized to violence and in turn prompting them to face it with impotence or indifference. This is demonstrated on the throttling noise rock single “Sounds We Cannot Hear” with its shrill, panic-inducing riffing and overall downtrodden uneasiness bluntly telling you how tens of families have died from a genocide in real-time as you make it through the day.
This uneasiness looms over the record like a morning fog on a Tuesday commute from how personal and commonplace the listening experience is. It’s fascinating, because Protomartyr built a pretty varied soundscape on this album and yet the dread never loses its presence throughout. Psychedelic pastiches of spaghetti Western and space age pop weave through tracks like “Exalted Eagles” and “Third Country” where bought and enforced adoration towards megalomaniacs distills into keeping acts like interventionism, colonization, and deportation alive. “Feed the Sewer” brandishes the soundtrack of a dystopian authoritarian regime in the shape of AI with an abrasiveness that, strangely enough, reminds me of a more straightforward but nonetheless feral Imperial Triumphant.
Each room in Hotel Usona proves to be hard to escape its clutches from given its visceral fixtures and unwanted companies. Still, the album does provide instances of sonic repose that act not as forms of escapism, but as moments to settle in and contemplate on the depravity of it all with a more reacclimated mind, even if the horrors persist. The song most representative of this is “Lavender – Gospel” which, despite its horrible reflections on US-backed armed conflicts and its fatal consequences, brings an atmospheric side to the band’s usual post-punk bravado that, with spacious and shimmering arrangements, beckons a brightness that transforms the feeling of helplessness into one of self-empathy and self-understanding; a necessary pick-me-up that gives enough strength to start asking the question: what can we do about this?
“Checking Out” closes the album by passing the baton to future generations with cautious optimism because, ultimately, we’re condemned to repeat history, and that is why Hotel Usona is so terrifyingly real. It’s not a surprise, then, that the album starts with the words ‘welcome back‘: Life does more often than not feel like the exit door of Lumon Industries in Severance, where time seems warped as we eventually end up in the same dire circumstances, witnessing the same tragedies, and being led by the same crooks. It’s an existential dilemma that becomes more excruciating as the days pass, but Protomartyr are smart – they’re not ones to completely wallow in defeat that easily. Hotel Usona is a record they should champion for years now not only due to its fearlessness and thoroughness, but the decision to branch out musically helped bring out the urgency of the lyrical matters with much clarity and determination. Throughout all of it, there’s a lingering reminder that we’re not alone in this and, sometimes, that’s enough to keep the fire alive. This truly is one of the heaviest works the quartet have put out and a clear-cut milestone for their already consistent trajectory.
Photo credit: Trevor Naud
