Interview: Protomartyr

Interviewed by Jack Montague

Since their debut album No Passion All Technique in 2012, Detroit post-punk band Protomartyr has epitomised a thousand stylistic layers of punk, with each new release seeming to inch closer to mastery. Starting from a raw-punk-on-rails concept, guitarist and co-producer Gree Ahee’s sparse yet prolific approach to sonic experimentation over the past decade has taken the group to the very edges of what defines genre. Hotel Usona, their seventh studio album, charges on with all new colours in its stride, dissolute as ever from the past. Frontman lyricist Joe Casey embodies his work with refreshing clarity. He’s decisive about what he wants, and at the core of it is subtlety. Nevermind Iggy Pop and the calculated stage dive. Joe told me he’d rather choose a prop and have it for the night. To him, Detroit is the simplicity of a beer can at the hip.oit is the simplicity of a beer can at the hip

You have a really specific voice, and it feels like you know it so well. When you first connected to your voice, how did you visualise it or feel about it?

What happened was, when we started, everything was loud and we were all drunk all the time. I was able to express myself without any sort of thought about it. And then even first recording, we did in one day. I didn’t even contemplate it. It was just something that I put out. But then as the recording studios got better and the songs got quieter and more interesting, that’s when I had to reckon with the ‘Oh shit, I’m a singer in a band.’ And I still have that issue, but I’ve embraced the fact that, if I am a guitar, it doesn’t have all the strings, it’s only got two. But a two string guitar can still play a pretty good song. And so I acknowledge my limitations and try to work within those. Because I like singers that can’t sing, and I don’t relate to people that have perfect pitch and can sing beautifully. They make beautiful songs but it doesn’t hit me. So, I hope people like the fact that I sing like shit.

In a sense, that’s also true of punk, and you guys had a far more punk sound with the first record than the following ones. Punk is so centered on lyricism - I was wondering how you summon a sense of raw power in your own writing?

I’ll tell you right now that in Detroit, currently, there’s a lot of new up and coming bands whose vocalists are very aggressive, and in the past a lot of Detroit singers were very in the time of, like, Detroit hardcore, and right now there’s a lot of Detroit electronic sounds like Ministry. Every band is trying to do electronic drums with guys shouting. That was always there, and John Brandon from Laughing Hyenas, dudes like that, were really powerful and could scare people with their voice, and I am not like that. So, early on I had to figure out, because I’d be shouting a lot, how to sing over this loud music and a terrible sound system, in some shitty bar, when I can’t sing. And, you know, there’s different kinds of shouting. When somebody punches you, you groan and go ‘Ohhh’, and that’s a shout. So I decided that my power, although you could call it a weakness, was going to come from the fact that Protomartyr is the sound of people dealing with reality. The yelling is more of an anguish or a capitulation. I’ve never tried to compete with the real yellers and tough guys because they’re really good at it, and I’m really bad at it. I’m not trying to be the strongest and toughest guy, vocally.

That’s such a great answer, and I’m definitely curious about how there’s been tension in some of your albums and release in others. But before I get to that, I did want to ask - how does the Protomartyr project encompass the way you feel about Detroit?

Sixteen years ago, I had a job that didn’t pay very well. It was the kind of job you have when you’re doing something as an artist and you need more headspace for that. I opened doors at a theater. Not much of a job. That’s how I met Greg, the guitar player. And that’s how things roll in Detroit. We had friends in bands and after our shitty job we would go to a bar and we’d drink and watch bands play, and the community of the music scene here is very egalitarian. Everybody here is just as good as anybody else. There’s no high stages here in Detroit, there’s no feeling like ‘Oh I can’t reach what’s on stage, I’ll never be…’ and so on, there’s none of that. So it was having a job that afforded me time to be in a band and realising that if I just had this job and nothing else it was a pretty sad existence. And my friends were in bands. Meeting Greg, it was like, let’s do this. Of course, Stevie Wonder is great, but there’s no gods in Detroit. There’s just people, and it’s a working class town. That kind of attitude makes for good music because no one’s trying to make it. Even today if I go to the bar and see a show, maybe one person sees that’s the guy from Protomartyr and the rest of them are like ‘who is that fat old man?’ No one cares. And that is the benefit of the music scene in Detroit, is that there isn’t a hierarchy. That is the attitude that we’ve taken as we’ve gone further from Detroit. You know, you go to LA and there’s good bands in LA but that’s a completely different scene that’s full of terrible people. Then you go to London, and oh my god, there’s some really great bands in London but it’s a terrible scene. Detroit has a really great scene, and we try to hold onto the idea that we’re not great just because we make music. You just get it done and do the work.

There’s a lot to be said for the fact that the greatest art arises from the ordinary working class and from what is brutally real. I read that you’ve dealt with the tension of reality in different ways. After Ultimate Success Today you preferred to lean into the musical aspects of creating, rather than to build tension. Are you still relating to that aspect of letting go when making music?

This new record is our seventh. And the first time you make a record you don’t expect it, so you go ‘Great, that’s it, that’s the only record we’re ever gonna make’. Then you get to the second one and you’re saying ‘Ok, let’s try to do better.’ But the point is that you’re trying to do something different from the one prior while maintaining the aspects of what you’re good at, the capacities of what you can do. Greg does that musically by having weird ideas. With that record, Ultimate Success Today, he wanted to have jazz musicians all over. And Protomartyr is many things but we’re not a jazzy band. We’re pretty much on rails. So I said it wouldn’t work. But bringing in the jazz musicians really worked. The combination I didn’t think was going to work, did. And then the next record, Formal Growth In The Desert, Greg says he wants a country, desert vibe with a pedal steel. This is before we even knew we were going to record in a desert. I said that wouldn’t work and it worked. So with Hotel Usona, Greg has been obsessed with a type of music from the 1950s called exotica. It’s like this fake, fantasy world music, but it’s basically what back then was high fidelity music, with fake Polynesian rhythms and that sort of thing. He was obsessed with it and he wanted that stuff on the record, and I said it wouldn’t work. As far as the tension and release thing, people say ‘you’re good at building up tension but you never release it’, and we realised we don’t know how to, musically. A couple of times we have stumbled into songs with a nice catharsis at the end. But people would call it the search for catharsis and I would have no idea what that is or how to get it. So we have our ambitions and we have the reality of what we can do, and we try to make each record exciting and interesting, and hopefully that will work. Greg has proven me wrong time and time again with concepts that seem dumb and end up unifying the album, binding it together. Who knows, though. Until this record is out and people have listened to it, so they can tell me what it means, the rough idea of what I think it means will change. 

It’s cool that Greg keeps surprising you. How have you surprised yourself with artistic habits you wouldn’t have imagined at the start of Protomartyr?

I wanna say I like this, upfront, because it’s going to sound like I’m complaining. But with each record the band comes up with the music, and with this last record Greg primarily came up with it. And then I write the lyrics after I’ve heard the music and after it’s almost a song. I might say, ‘Oh, let’s try to double that part because it feels like a chorus’ or something, but mostly they do their own thing coming up with this music. And I partake in the creation of it but I basically step back until it’s done. Writing lyrics to it from that place can sometimes be a challenge because you’re like, ‘What does this music mean to me?’ and then you try to write it. And I don’t know chords or any of that stuff, so it becomes a challenge for me where I wish I could write the words, and then they write beautiful music to it and then I’m done. But going back, when we had to go on tour, we had to record this old song so I had to listen to it again. I’m constantly amazed that what I thought was this struggle to write the perfect lyric just seems like it flows out of me and I wonder, ‘where the hell did I get that line from?’ It could just be kind of bubbled up. Or sometimes it’s from an old book. Or a TV show, or something I overheard. But the way it’s stitched together, I can’t replicate it and go back and say how I did it. I’m always surprised and think I did a good job at something. Or ‘How did I get that turn of phrase?’ Or ‘Why did that feel like such a struggle at the time?’

What records in your own collection were you spinning in the leadup to Hotel Usona?

It was interesting, because the reason why Greg kind of had to work alone writing the music on that record was because Alex (the drummer) and I both had kids and we weren’t around. I wasn’t really listening to much music, so I ended up listening to a lot of children’s music. Songs from Sesame Street, and Raffy, and that old kind of stuff, and old folk songs. Which you think would be a bad idea, because now you’ve got to go and write this really depressing album about how America is fucked. But no. What’s good about listening to children’s music, or at least good children’s music because there’s a lot of shitty stuff, is that you learn the simplicity of storytelling and it reminds you not to get too up your own asshole about making the most esoteric, difficult things to understand. I’m actually going to google it as we chat. 

Having any luck?

Yes. So it’s from Cape Verde. The song is called To Martins by Zeca Di Nha Reinalda, who was in a band called Bulimundo. I listened to this nonstop. It’s a sad song about one of their friends that died. I was obsessed with this Zeca guy. And then he has a song called Proverbio, which is a weird dance song, with Verde style of dance in Cape Verde. And so we’re sitting in western New York recording and I’m listening to this song Proverbio as my pump up song, to get up and keep working. And it’s all in Portuguese, I believe, or in the language that they speak on the island which I think is a form of Portuguese. So I don’t know what the fuck the guy is saying, but it’s the way he’s saying it. I had these two sides of the coin where I had this beautiful song where this guy is singing to his dead friend about mothers, and then I had this dance song, and so it was a good combo to take into the studio and try and record. I was just fascinated. There was a period where I listened to the song 20 times a day, and then once the album was over I didn’t really listen to it at all. So I don’t know what the next cool punk band is. I’m almost fifty years old and I gotta catch up. But when I latch onto these things I take all the nutrients from it. So yeah, I’ve been listening to children’s music.

I was also going to ask you about a specific song on the album - the song Converts. It’s so different to what you’ve done before. Tell me about the process of writing and mixing that song. 

That started a hundred per cent because Greg got a pedal. I believe it was a pedal that we got in Oklahoma City where we stopped off on tour. He got a weird ass pedal that made some weird ass sounds. And he had been kind of messing around with it and got the weird melody thing that starts the song, while Scott is doing a weird bassline to it. A lot of this album was Greg holed away for months, hunched over the computer writing all this stuff, and then that song was like, easy, because we just used that pedal and then did the song. It was good because we didn’t have to work on it too much and we sort of worked together. Lyrically, I knew I wanted to talk about modern American politics, but writing about Trump is impossible just because it’s just hard to write about something so insane. You can try to nail him, but it’s like trying to nail water and there’s nothing you can do. He’s just such an insane person. Whereas JD Vance is such a snivelling man, he’s relatable because we all know a guy like JD Vance. If you know somebody like Trump they’re probably in an insane asylum. But JD Vance is a guy that you knew in high school, this kind of slimy loser that was just trying to get ahead and transform their personality. When I was in high school there were always the jocks that were kind of assholes, but then there were the guys that were trying to be the jock’s friends who were the worst assholes because they were trying to impress these jocks, while the jocks never even thought about them, positive or negative. But the fat losers that were trying to worm into those groups were the guys that would pick on you. So I thought I could come in from the angle of his conversion to Catholicism, which is one of the most pathetic things I’ve ever seen. Him trying to lecture the Pope on Catholicism. His whole life story is fascinating, and his pretending through that Hillbilly Elegy book, which people ate up. Before they knew he was going to be this craven they thought it was the greatest book ever. What’s going to happen is that Trump is going to die tomorrow, hope it comes true, and then the Trump world will be over. But this evil will still exist and JD Vance will try to fill that void. But I don’t think he can, because he lacks personality and persuasive power. He will definitely still be a problem for a long time, though. So to make this album listenable in a couple of years, we’ve gotta go after JD Vance, not Trump. 

How do you bring together your onstage identity with your suits, the specific look, and the character that you enter during live sets?

That started from the beginning. The reason being that I had terrible stage fright. I’m not a person that likes to be on stage or having people look at me. So it helps that I usually wear glasses, and if I take my glasses off I can’t see. Then I’d have to get pretty drunk to get onstage because I was also very nervous. But also at the exact same time we had started I was thinking a lot about stage persona and what I could do, and fascinated by somebody like Dean Martin, because he was so drunk all the time onstage. And the truth of the matter is that he probably was sometimes, but a lot of the times he actually just pretended to be drunk. And I think a lot of people do that to mask their terrible stage fright. His glass might be full of apple juice and you wouldn’t know. I always had it in my mind that you don’t actually have to be drunk if you have the mindset of being drunk, which might allow you to break through stage fright. I’ve used that somewhat to my advantage. The other thing was, it’s deciding who you are. Like the singing, and deciding I’m not going to be aggressive and yell in people’s faces, what’s much scarier to me is a person staring at me as I perform. Bands at the time were doing a lot of grand gestures like falling to the ground or jumping into the crowd, constantly egging the crowd. I decided I was doing none of that because I don’t like it. When a band says, ‘move forward’, I want to move back. That’s the worst. So I’m thinking about the small gesture. The big gesture is great, but I can’t do it. I’ll put a hand in the pocket, or grab the microphone firmly. Some bands with big gestures are my favourite bands. My good friends in the great band Shame are an example. But Shane would take his shirt off at the exact same point every night and hold the microphone over his head and lose his mind, all programmed in, and that’s not something I want to do. The thing is, the first time I ever saw Iggy Pop it was amazing because it was like lightning struck and everybody rushed the stage. But then I saw him again and everybody did the same thing at the exact same moment, and the magic was gone. Sometimes I think my refusal to start break-dancing leads to a fairly boring show. But here’s the thing. Because I’ve always done this, people don’t say I’ve stopped moving around now because I’m older. I never did it in the first place. I wish I could do those kicks like Robert Pollard from Guided By Voices, but I wouldn’t bet that he could do those kicks anymore. I have found the small gesture to be what I am good at and the ailment to my stage fright. 

You can always just hold a can of beer at your hip and have that be your prop. 

Yes. And whereas before when I had to go onstage I’d have to drink copious amounts, now what I have is maybe one drink, and the one drink I have is after the show. I don’t need the booze, necessarily, to perform. It’s just the comfortable feeling of props, which is nice. 

My last question is, what’s your favourite part about working with Greg?

It’d be so much easier to answer what I hate about him, but alas. With Greg, I will say that we’ve been friends for all this time and before so that helps. It’s weird being in a business with somebody. That’s the weirdest part about being in a band, and the reason we’ve lasted so long is because we’ve learned each other’s personalities back and front and managed to find space for each other. We know when someone is venting and so on. So we don’t fight as much anymore. What I like about Greg specifically is that he is probably the funniest member of the band, and he’s very smart. Put it this way. Alex is the most book smart. Scott is the most open hearted and when he goes he’s the funniest. But Greg has the quick wit. He’s also a pretty good guitarist which helps.

Protomartyr's brand new album 'Hotel Usona' is out now

Available to listen here