The members of Protomartyr have learned several valuable lessons since achieving minor-league success with 2014’s Under Color of Official Right. For example: distrust comfort.
Take it from guitarist Greg Ahee. For years, Protomartyr rehearsed in a grimy warehouse space in the band’s native Detroit. Then, while prepping The Agent Intellect—the band’s third and finest yet album, released last week—the group moved their practice space into bassist Scott Davidson’s basement. “It was a little bit less inspiring to write there because it was more comfortable,” Ahee says. “Our [previous] practice space, being that it was a warehouse space, was very cold, very uninviting. That made it so we just want to get right down to work every time we’re there. When we’re in Scott’s basement, we didn’t really feel that way.” Behold the luxuries: “He’s got a nice TV. He’s got air conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter.”
None of those amenities were available in the practice space where the band wrote every song on its first two albums, including Under Color and 2012’s No Passion All Technique. So Ahee bought an acoustic guitar, locked himself in his room, and wrote several hundred song fragments, which—once he brought them to frontman Joe Casey—mutated into the material on the new record.
That fear of growing too comfortable pervades The Agent Intellect: This is post-punk that refuses to sit still. Alex Leonard’s drumming stutters with anxiety, occasionally shifting tempos mid-song, while Ahee’s guitar work alternates between darkly melodic riffs and sudden blasts of white-hot noise (as on first single “Why Does It Shake?”). And then there is Joe Casey, whose vocal presence exists in a low, rambling growl that teeters between a sung baritone and hoarse, chant-like repetition. Sometimes he’s muttering to himself, and sometimes he’s barking surreal orders: “Remove the fire from thine eyes…please!” he repeats, steadily but obsessively, at the end of the frantic “Boyce or Boice.”
An obvious point of comparison is Mark E. Smith of The Fall, except that Casey favors a subtler intensity—he intones more than he shrieks, and obviously isn’t British. (Still, the Smith influence is especially apparent on the great Under Color track “Tarpeian Rock,” in which Casey appears to be rattling off people to be thrown from an Ancient Roman cliff.) When I tell Casey that he doesn’t have a particularly conventional singing style, he chuckles a bit: “That’s a nice way to put it.” It’s meant as a compliment—Casey’s oddball vocal exertions are part of what makes Protomartyr stand out from the indie herd—though the frontman will be the first to admit he has zero singing experience outside of this band. So how’d he land this role?
“Alex, the drummer, has a really good singing voice,” Casey says. So does Ahee. “But neither of them wanted to sing at all. And because I can’t play guitar or play drums, it was like: ‘Oh, I guess I’ll have to be the singer.’” Audience reactions often amuse him. “Occasionally someone will say, ‘The lead singer doesn’t sing a note until, like, the third song.’ And I’ll cop to that. I’m like, Oh, really, I sang a note! I’m very surprised.”
Want tour stories? Spend 30 seconds with Protomartyr, who’ve spent much of the last two years on the road. “We’re not a band at the level where we can just stay in a hotel every night. We gotta ask people if we can sleep on their floors,” Casey says. “That can be a little bit harrowing.” He fondly recalls one gig in Syracuse, at an instrument shop where nobody showed up. They found a couple willing to let them crash. The downside: “When you find people nice enough to let a band stay in their house, they’re usually nice enough to have eight or nine cats. Seriously, you could not look anywhere without seeing cats.”
Alex Leonard happened to be highly allergic. He spent that night sleeping in the van.
Protomartyr’s origin story, like most aspects of its existence, is an unusual one. Joe Casey is 38—roughly a decade older than his bandmates. He lives in northwest Detroit, in the same red-brick house where he grew up in the 1980s. His answer to “Why now?” is surprisingly poignant: When he reached his mid-30s, his father died of a sudden heart attack and his mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
“Once people [you’re] close to start dying, you realize how limited your time is,” Casey says. “You should at least try to do something that you like as opposed to sitting around and being bummed out all the time. That’s kind of what I was doing before dad died. Now’s the time to do something.”