Protomartyr Announce New Album Ultimate Success Today, Share “Processed By The Boys” Video

Detroit post-punk band Protomartyr announce the arrival of their fifth album, Ultimate Success Today, and share a music video for the single “Processed By The Boys.” The album will be released on May 29 on Domino Records.

Last year, the band reissued their first album, No Passion All Technique, which was self-released in 2012 but had since fallen out of print. Ultimate Success Today follows the band’s acclaimed 2017 album Relatives in Descent. The two albums are akin in substance, both being political ruminations about the self-induced decline of American civilization.

“The re-release of our first album had me thinking about the passage of time and its ultimate conclusion,” says Protomartyr frontman Joe Casey in a statement. “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?”

The first single from the forthcoming record, “Processed By The Boys,” has the classic wall-of-noise feel of a Protomartyr track, with the hilarious visual of a C-SPAN studio audience member being harassed by a puppet while Casey sings. The music video, directed by David Allen & Nathan Faustyn, and produced by HLPTV & LooseMeat.Biz, is actually based on a viral video clip titled “Puppet trolling viewer during the concert live on Brazilian TV.” The band apparently became obsessed with the clip and knew they wanted to recreate it themselves.

“As soon as we heard the concept, we knew how to take the band’s ideas and coalesce them into this sort of timeless public access chaos,” says Faustyn in a statement.

The lyrics of “Processed By The Boys” shockingly juxtapose the inherent humor of the music video with the song’s opening lines : “When the ending comes / Is it gonna run / At us like a wide-eyed animal? / A foreign disease / Washed upon the beach / A dagger plunged from out of the shadows.”

“There is darkness in the poetry of Ultimate Success Today,” says Ana da Silva, founding member of The Raincoats, in a bio for the album. “The theme of things ending, above all human existence, is present and reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Our world has reached a point that makes us afraid: fires, floods, earthquakes, hunger, war, intolerance … There are cries of despair. Is there hope? Greed is the sickness that puts life in danger.”

Watch the music video for “Processed By The Boys” below, and see the details of Ultimate Success Today further down, along with Protomartyr’s tour dates. You can preorder their new record right here.