Protomartyr just announced their fifth album, Ultimate Success Today, out May 29 via Domino, and we can’t wait.
Following the release of Relatives In Descent, the band’s critically acclaimed headlong dive into the morass of American life in 2017 (featured on myriad “best of” lists, including The New York Times, Esquire, Newsweek, and more), Ultimate Success Today continues to further expand the possibilities of what a Protomartyr album can sound like.
“The re-release of our first album had me thinking about the passage of time and its ultimate conclusion,” says singer Joe Casey of Ultimate Success Today. “Listening to No Passion All Technique again, I could hear myself hoping for an introduction and a long future but also being cognizant that it could be ‘one and done’ for us. So, when it came time to write Ultimate Success Today, I was reminded of that first urgency and how it was an inverse of my current grapple with how terribly ill I’ve been feeling lately. Was that sick feeling coloring how I felt about the state of the world, or was it the other way around?
“This panic was freeing in a way. It allowed me to see our fifth album as a possible valediction of some confusingly loud, five-act play. In the same light, I see it as an interesting mile-marker of our first decade of being a band—a crest of the hill along a long highway. Although, just to cover my bases, I made sure to get my last words in while I still had the breath to say them.
“There are exquisite, subtle gifts from other instruments that always heighten the guitar, instead of fighting with it,” explains da Silva. “They help to create a harmonious wall of sound all of its own. This was intentional. Greg Ahee wanted to use different textures other than pedals, and the drone quality of some of those instruments colors the guitar and the whole sound with a warm, rich-in-reverb, yet all-consuming landscape for Joe Casey’s voice.”
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