Protomartyr - Hotel Usona (2026)
the buzzing in your ear - september 25, 2026
The United States, as of 2026, is an empire in the middle of a very stupid decline. Most of us are well aware of this. It is a lame nation entering its sundowning period, decaying in strange and weird ways in real-time. The withering of empire carries with it a dark shadow on those both within and without its borders, as it both breaks down in providing support to its people and lashes out in violence in desperate attempts to demonstrate hard power and reinforce soft power. Fascism begins to creep in and promises to revive a failed dream by killing or disappearing everyone who can be easily blamed in increasingly esoteric ways (the brown, the queer, the left). All the while, generative AI has brought us the fascinating advancement of driving whisks into the brains of everyone we love and turning their minds into slurry, spewing industrial quantities of disinformation as both bug and feature. It is, increasingly, a violent and terrifying time to be in. It is in this context that Protomartyr, the now-long-running post-punks from the slowly gentrifying post-industrial Detroit, thunder in with the captivating, burning Hotel Usona.
True to its name, Usona (short for “United States of North America”) constructs the great* nation** (or, at the very least, its present moment) as an unbelievably shitty hotel. In particular, it’s one of those shitty hotels—in far commuter suburbs, along highway exits, behind grocery stores, nestled into mid-size cities—that induces dread in you as soon as you see the dreaded "by" in its name. That one word is a helpful tool to let you know that any good (or, at the very least, interesting) future for this place has been mercifully snuffed by corporate acquisitions, mergers and takeovers. Its existence will now be a semipermanent state of boring badness and a delta of change between slow and rapid decline before being its swift execution when it no longer satisfies corporate growth requirements. This is the space in which you will exist now.
Hotel Usona is both Protomartyr’s first ever concept album and their bleakest work to date, which is worth some note considering this band was already well-renowned for their darkly comic pessimism on the way in. Still, its unrelenting horror rises to meet the moment. Joe Casey (singer, lyricist, Tigers fan) takes us through the rooms of this collapsing hotel in this collapsing world: staff members freak out over their Google reviews as the cleaning staff goes missing in raids. In another room, a drone fires shells of white phosphorus. Across the hall, a man, one of many, convulses on the floor as his violences are burned back into him by a Jacob Marley-like ghost. There’s a personalized suite/tomb for JD Vance, man without identity, patron failson, sauceless boy herald of the future. Peter Thiel is buried alive next to his white pharaoh. In “Feed the Sewer,” easily the angriest song here, artificial intelligence exists as an entity constantly feasting on shit. It is a machine fed by feces and fascism and precious resources, spewing the results back out in slop buckets to be consumed for no benefit. It is a disgusting, rotten thing, and I cannot stop replaying it.
In building the hotel, Protomartyr also beefed up their sonic palette, the results of which turn Usona into a strikingly lush, intricate piece of work. This is a tendency we’ve heard before-- the boys are no strangers to underlining their pieces with, for example, the bassoons on “Processed by the Boys” or the strings behind “The Chuckler.” It has not been seen until now, however, what they would do when allowed to deviate as much as they wished. Enter David Fridmann, producer of a million of your favorite albums, and son Jon, who provides the horns. You can tell how much passion Greg Ahee (guitarist, co-producer, first guy to die in “Ain’t So Simple”) has been wanting to pour into every track the band makes this whole time, and he sounds completely unrestrained. “The Knife Dream” is ghostly, whispered vocals emerging from swirls of brass and deep, ever-building, frantic yet never-resolved tension. “Third Country” seems to be built around a faded, cracking vinyl loop that calls to mind something up Beirut’s wheelhouse, only twisted and violent and stratified. Both of the first two singles, the aforementioned “Sewer” and “Sounds We Cannot Hear,” are noisy in ways many of the band’s catalogue has been, yet the new sound taps into a deep wellspring of rage and sorrow that’s been very hard to come by since Relatives in Descent. It’s muscular, emboldened, very pissed off, and morose about it.
Special mention must be made of the drums. Alex Leonard (jumped-up homunculus) turns in his best work since “A Private Understanding” here. His percussion does so much to define this album’s frantic, terrified energy. The furious drum rolls on “Sewer,” the stilted beat on “Converts,” the bells on “The Knife Dream,” the switch-up as Joe addresses his daughter on “Checking Out”—it’s a mighty performance that, thanks to Fridmann’s production, has never sounded better, clearer, or louder. These drums will kick your ass.
The final result is a vivid, grandiose portrait of the utterly sorrowful state we (read: Americans, America, those exposed to the cognitohazard known as “America”) are in. This hotel portends the obsolescence of everything good, everything hopeful, everything you thought was honestly kinda cool, even everything bad, but bad in an interesting way, and the replacement of these with a tidal wave of incoherence and violence and an acrid fusion of blind patriotism and bitter cruelty. This album smells like mildew and fake-lavender air freshener and an iron burning through its board. It reeks of the death of things. It is a shit “smart” Vizio television that barely gets cable and won’t even let you log into YouTube. It is a busted window and bulletproof glass at the concierge desk. The eagle on the cover is coated in gold, and the gold looks like piss.
Through Hotel Usona’s rich concept and freshly expanded sound, Protomartyr succeed at constructing a physical place and forcing you to inhabit it. As the hotel forms around you, you can feel the wet spot in the carpeting, trace your fingertips along the scratch marks in the nightstand, and catch the bedbugs right before they scamper to your luggage. The spaces where people used to be, people perhaps happier than you, lives that were once and now are not. The horrible histories contained in pockets of empty presence in the closet, under the bed, behind the shower curtain. You can breathe in the mustiness in the air. This is your air now, and it will always be your air, even if you only stay a moment. Enjoy the mouldering expanses of a nation that once held some sort of vague promise, or don’t. You’re going to have to deal with its belligerent death throes in this world all the same.
thick pale green light