Alternative
Domino · 25 September 2026
The first thing you notice about Hotel Usona is the horns. Protomartyr had already let outside instruments in with the saxophones and cello of Ultimate Success Today (2020), but the brass is new: on “Converts” (4:06) Jon Fridmann’s trumpets pull out over Alex Leonard’s drums and leave Joe Casey’s voice further back than this band has ever placed it. They take the space the riff used to occupy.
“The Old Hotel” (4:21) opens with Casey playing host on some late-night radio show, which is the image the whole record grows from: America as an old hotel, every song a room, every room a guest who won’t leave. The conceit holds because Casey never explains it. He just uses it to get into the songs.
“Sounds We Cannot Hear” (5:26) was the first single, back in July, and it carries the line that sums up what’s on his mind this time (“it’s the weight you cannot bear / it’s the guilt you cannot feel”): what sits at the centre of this album is the capacity to go numb, more than guilt itself. “Feed the Sewer” (4:36) comes back at it through noise, with artificial intelligence and adulterated information as its subject, and “Lavender – Gospel” (4:10) rounds off the idea of handing machines whatever is hard to look at.
“The Knife Dream” (5:59) is where the record goes furthest out: a slow arrangement, very little rhythmic body, and a tension that never discharges. On “Third Country” (4:38) Greg Ahee pulls a fifties exotica tone that you wouldn’t assume from a Detroit post-punk band, and the result sounds more desert than city. “Checking Out” (7:42) closes, by some distance the longest track here and the only one that lets itself stretch.
Dave Fridmann produced it at his Tarbox Road Studios in upstate New York, and it shows in the density: a great deal is sounding at once and all of it is stored in a space that feels smaller than it is. This is the band’s seventh album, arriving three years and three months after Formal Growth in the Desert (Domino, 2 June 2023), which ran thirty-seven and a half minutes; this one runs forty-five.
Eight of the nine tracks sit between 4:06 and 5:59 and all follow the same plan: entry, accumulation, Casey saying it louder each time. The palette is new; what it paints hasn’t moved. Only “Checking Out” breaks the mould, and it does so last, when there’s no time left to see what might have happened had the band tried the same thing halfway through.
Nine tracks, forty-five minutes, Domino, 25 September. Joe Casey (vocals), Greg Ahee (guitar), Scott Davidson (bass) and Alex Leonard (drums).
Rating: 8.0/10
Text by Marçal Bonastre