Protomartyr check in to the apocalypse on Hotel Usona

On stages worldwide, the band's singer, Joe Casey, has swaggered as little as possible while dripping softly spoken bile into the microphone. Mostly stories of distant cities, diseases blooming out of reach, ballads of dope clouds, and shadowy forces slowly slipping in. Protomartyr have always been concerned with the absurd, the terrible, and the apocalyptic, but Hotel Usona is their first record that truly lives in it: not a world of noise and terror, not even a nation or city, just a smoky room where the wretched lie praying under dim light to eagle-haired false prophets. America is a hotel on the band's fourth album for Domino Records: a damp, soon-to-be-foreclosed building where management no longer cares about overblown radiators, mouldy walls, and sprung leaks. What's left behind are the voices in the rooms, the sounds aching down the wire. Doomsday is here, says Casey, and we’re all its guests, checked in long past a time we can remember, too used to the comforts of our crumbling empire to dare try and leave. You might expect this moment to be captured through screams and distortion. You might expect this album to be Protomartyr’s grand reckoning, one where the cymbal smashe...