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May 28, 2020 Protomartyr By Christopher Roberts

Detroit-formed post-punkers Protomartyr are releasing a new album, Ultimate Success Today, on July 17 via Domino. Now they have another new song from the album, “Michigan Hammers,” via a video for the track. Yoonha Park directed the video, which features clips from action movies and is also a play on the Detroit-set sci-fi/action classic Robocop. Watch it below.

Park had this to say about the video in a press release: “This video is a retelling of a well-known Michigan folk tale that describes timeless themes of greed, power, death and rebirth and nothing short of the conflict of good and evil.”

Frontman Joe Casey adds: “Couldn’t make a ‘proper’ video due to the miasma. So why not make one using what tools remain? That’s sort of what MICHIGAN HAMMERS is about I think—building with rubble. It’s probably about that and mules, syndicates, too many parking lots, camaraderie, the ideal happy hour, failure, and takin’ what they’re givin’ ‘cause we’re workin’ for a livin’ until we start takin’ it to the streets. Or something like that.”

Ultimate Success Today was due out May 29, but in April it was pushed back to July 17 because of COVID-19. Previously Protomartyr shared Ultimate Success Today’s first single, “Processed By the Boys,” via a video for the song. “Processed By the Boys” was one of our Songs of the Week. Then they shared another song from the album, “Worm in Heaven,” via a video for the track.

Ultimate Success Today is the band’s fifth album and the follow-up to 2017’s Relatives in Descent and 2018’s Consolation E.P., both also released by Domino. Last year they also put out a deluxe reissue of their debut album, No Passion All Technique.

The band co-produced Ultimate Success Today with David Tolomei (Dirty Projectors, Beach House), who also mixed it. It was recorded at Dreamland Recording Studios, a late 19th century church in Upstate New York

Protomartyr is Joe Casey (vocals), Greg Ahee (guitars), Alex Leonard (drums), and Scott Davidson (bass guitar). Ultimate Success Today also features various guest musicians: Nandi Rose aka Half Waif (vocals), Jemeel Moondoc (alto sax), Izaak Mills (bass clarinet, sax, flute), and Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello).

Casey had this to say about the album in a previous press release: “The re-release of our first album had me thinking about the passage of time and its ultimate conclusion. 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.”

Read our 2017 interview with Protomartyr.

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