25 September 2026 – Protomartyr Checks Into the Uneasy Rooms of Hotel Usona

Detroit post-punk veterans Protomartyr release their seventh studio album Hotel Usona through Domino, with Dave Fridmann producing at Tarbox Road Studios in western New York. Joe Casey imagines contemporary America as an ageing hotel, allowing each of the record's nine songs to inhabit a different unpleasant room.

"Sounds We Cannot Hear" examines the numbing overload of modern life, "Feed the Sewer" turns toward artificial intelligence, "Third Country" addresses deportation, and other tracks explore violence, nationalism, anxiety and parenthood. Those themes arrive in the typically Protomartyr fashion: not as tidy manifestos but through Casey's dry, weary storytelling over Greg Ahee's guitar architecture, Scott Davidson's bass and Alex Leonard's increasingly forceful drumming.

Fridmann, whose production history includes The Flaming Lips and MGMT, gives the band's tension additional physical weight without polishing away the grime. There are also new musical colours, including horns and influences reaching beyond the band's established post-punk vocabulary. Hotel Usona therefore feels less like Protomartyr changing direction than expanding the building around themselves. After more than a decade of documenting unease with unusual precision, they have apparently decided that one metaphorical room is no longer enough. They have booked an entire hotel, and checkout does not appear especially straightforward.