protomartyr’s joe casey still comes to jumbo’s. (just not every night.)

On a Thursday evening in mid-August, I’m wrapping up my third consecutive listen of Protomartyr’s yet-unreleased seventh album, Hotel Usona. “This fuckin’ rules so hard,” and my wife patiently smiles and says, “I’m glad,” I’m assuming. I can’t hear her. I can only hear metal screeching, dark jazz horns, lush guitar chords, and Joe Casey’s voice. “We’ll walk this road together,” he reassures me. The songs work quite well on their own, but it’s the first Protomartyr record where I can tell I’ll always be reaching for the entire thing rather than just my favorite tracks. 

The record ends and I leave the house to head to Jumbo’s, where I’ll be interviewing Casey. I’m opening my car door when I hear the loud, unfortunately-familiar hum of an Amazon drone, but I pause when it doesn’t fade away. I turn to and watch it hover awkwardly, at the intersection, seemingly lost. A guy my dad’s age pulls up in a burgundy Chrysler and says, “They’re bigger than you think, right?” I agree. He tells me about how he’s seen them drop neighbors’ packages from ten or fifteen feet off the ground, then warns, “I’ve seen the movies, man, this is weird shit,” as he pulls off. Thirty seconds later a barefooted man on a long board screams and flips off a red Chevy IROC with literal monster truck wheels that comes within a foot or two of flattening him. I am a guest of the Hotel Usona.

I tell Joe this story when we sit, drinking beers, at a table on the Jumbo’s deck. We discuss venues, the current Detroit scene, their new album and the evolution of their sound. We also talk about Kiyoshi Kurosawa films (and some lines that made it onto the album) and the Detroit Tigers. After the interview, he’ll show me exactly where he used to play naked hunks Photo Hunt on the bar’s Megatouch machine and I’ll feel like I’m at Tastee-Freez chomping chili-dogs with Mellencamp.

I was pretty thrilled when I was told the interview would be here at Jumbo’s. I was wondering if this is still a home base or a comfort spot for you.

Yeah, I don’t get here as much as I want to—life has kind of moved past going to the bar all the time—but we have a friend coming into town tomorrow and my group of friends will probably all meet here. So it is kind of like, “someone’s in town, let’s go to Jumbo’s for a drink.” And I’m sure after the show at the Majestic we’ll probably come over here. If I have a day away from the kid, or something, I’ll try to make my way down here. 

When you guys were starting out you played here a lot, right? Were you coming here before that? 

Yeah, when I was in my going-to-the-bar-every-night routine, this would definitely be the one I’d go to the most. Play touch screen all night because there weren’t really too many shows here. We had to kind of put them together ourselves. I guess we maybe played the Lager House more, because here you had to bring all your gear and everything. I think you can still get shocked from the stage here. I don’t think the stage is grounded [laughs]. And the regulars here also hate when there’s a show, you know, “What the fuck is this music?” But yeah, we had some of our earliest shows here. 

And you still book shows here after Christmas.

Yeah, the day after Christmas, which every year I say is the last time I’m doing it. Again, before I was married and had a kid, I was like, I’ll make sure I pay the bands and it’ll be a free show, so people will show up. Now it’s becoming more and more like, I gotta save that money for that kid [laughs]. But I also don’t want the bands to have to play a free show or to go through the trouble of having to collect money from people, either. 

I’m a bad booker. I couldn’t be a booker. This is the only one I do. I’ll probably do it again this year. It started as a way for us to play every year, because it’s St. Stephen’s Day and he’s the Protomartyr, but as we started getting more popular, it got too claustrophobic, so we stopped playing and I was like, “Oh, I can book other bands.” It’s been fun to try and book a band that I either don’t know too well, or I ask people, “Hey, what’s the new up-and-coming band?” So that’s good that the night hasn’t become, “Here’s me and my old friends—these old bastards onstage.” That’s a trap you can fall into when you get old. “I gotta book a band, let’s book Tyvek again!”

I’ve seen you at a ton of shows. I feel like every third show I go to you’re there. 

Yeah, since I had the kid it’s been harder to go out but, when we do go out, we try to go to a show.

Any younger bands—it could be any you booked for that show—that are on your radar right now? The music is still very good here. 

Yeah. I do feel like there’s been an uptick—and I don’t know if that’s because I just wasn’t really paying attention for a couple years. But it seems like in the last five years I’ll start seeing flyers online and think, I don’t know where that house is [laughs]. And I would never go to somebody’s basement now, but there does seem to be a pretty vibrant scene. And, similar to the way it was, there’s mixing and mingling among different crews. There’s still the Outer Limits type bands and the electronic stuff coming in. I’d say it’s probably better than it’s ever been. The reason I’m paying more attention to it is because I write for CREEM, so I’m trying not to just write about my friends, since that’s the easiest thing to do. But the scene’s better now than it has been in years, I’d say. 

Speaking of your stuff in CREEM, I don’t know if you were at that Jack White show…

I was not, no. 

I couldn’t help but think about your Pine Knob piece for CREEM while I was there. My buddy and I were wondering why he’d even want to play Pine Knob and we came to the conclusion that it must have just been a bucket list thing for someone who grew up in Michigan to want to play there, given the opportunity. Is there a venue you’d want to play that you’ve thought about like that? 

For the longest time, when I was going to shows in high school, Saint Andrew’s was where all the shows went through, which I think is less of a thing now. So I always wanted to play Saint Andrew’s, and we played there once, opening up for the lead singer of the Jam, Paul Weller. That was a weird show, I don’t know how we got the gig [laughs].

It seems like random bands are always opening for people at Saint Andrew’s. 

And that was probably the biggest venue I’d go to see shows. It’s never been a dream to play bigger places, necessarily. That was one of the funniest things, when we went on the tour with IDLES—very nice guys—one of them was like, “yeah we’re playing Wembley. I don’t know. That was never my dream to play Wembley.” And, you know, if I had the opportunity, I wouldn’t poopoo fuckin’ playing Wembley [laughs]! Must be nice!

And they’d already played Glastonbury.

And I’m sure there’s some festivals. Like I would never play Glastonbury. I don’t have any desire to play Coachella, but it’d be nice to be asked [laughs].

Did you guys do Primavera? That seems like the coolest one. 

We did Primavera, yeah, that’s probably the cool one now. And Primavera Portugal was also very nice. That’s another thing where we’re like, [faux whiny voice] “Are they ever gonna ask us back?” Maybe this new album, we’ll see.  

Well, let’s get into that. The USA in the title isn’t lost on me. I was sort of thinking about how the idea of the country being a building somehow makes it scarier because it’s smaller. I guess I’m just wondering why a concept album, or if you’d even consider it a concept album. 

I wouldn’t just because people hate concept albums usually [laughs]. It’s a cheat, because each song is kind of self-contained to somebody in the hotel. So there’s no overarching plot, necessarily. But maybe those are concept albums. It wasn’t planned to be one, but I guess that’s what it ended up being. 

And the marketing certainly leans into it being one. 

Yeah, well, that’s the marketing [laughs].

The website’s great! How much did you guys have to do with that? 

We ended up having to do a lot with that. It was Domino’s suggestion, which, good for them. It’s their job to try to sell the record. I don’t know if people go to websites anymore. It was very annoying because at first they were like, “Here’s the website, all the pictures are AI, the writing is AI,” and I said, “Well, the album is firmly in the ‘AI is terrible, anti-human’ [vein]” and it was kind of a back and forth like, “Well, wouldn’t it be kind of poking fun at AI?” and I’m like, “No. You can’t use a gun to be against guns.” 

So then we ended up writing all the text and making sure we asked Trevor, our photographer friend, if he had any photos that looked like hotels and he had tons, so yeah. But, it’s one of those things where, do people even look at websites anymore? I don’t know. But that kind of stuff is fun. 

I was particularly struck with the photo of all the towels smushed into the corner, where the bath meets the wall, because that’s what I do. 

Yeah, you come out of the shower, you have one on the ground...

I never want room service to come in my room—I clean up after myself—and I smash all the towels.

Yes, I don’t wanna hang ‘em up, ‘cause then they’ll look like they’re clean, so I make sure they’re identified as dirty; just a big pile of crap. 

Thinking about the aforementioned Amazon drone, along with AI, there’s a balance throughout the album, where the lyrics are things like, “the scroll deforms the day,” “you’ve got to earn a living,” “we got a bad review,” “complicity is compensated.” You have to be involved in this system, but it’s an inherently evil system. 

It’s annoying as hell to sit down and be like, “We’re going to write a record that’s about the state of America,” because those are usually very terrible [laughs]. Or, like a message where you’re pointing out that something is bad. A lot of people don’t want to hear that, or it comes off as too mawkish or something. You always have to approach it from, “well, from where I stand, there’s nothing I can do to change this system, necessarily,” and I think that’s what most people are dealing with and have probably been dealing with for a long time.

Like you say, all of a sudden drones are flying in the sky, data centers are being built whether you like it or not. You’re part of the system and that feeling of being weak and unable to do anything is a relatable thing. So you approach it from that angle and hopefully it’s less annoying, because it’s closer to reality, as opposed to, [mocking voice] “we all gotta stand up and join together” [laughs].

Everybody bang your pans at three o’clock or whatever the fuck

Yeah. And people always ask, “do you think music has the ability to change the world?” and I’m like, “no, music does not have the ability to change the world.”

Just ask Zack de la Rocha.

Yeah. That’s a band where their message was never clearer and a lot of their fans are like, “well I don’t know.” People don’t listen to the lyrics anyway. “Oh you like Rage Against the Machine?” [weirdo voice] “I’m not the machine! I thought it was about fighting a robot” [laughs]. Every time we put out a record, somebody in the comments or something will be like, “Aw man, I used to like this band before they talked about politics.”

And became leftists!

“Woke leftists!” And it’s like, “OK, fine. That’s right. We weren’t until this newest album.”

I was also thinking about the irony of being in a band where you’ve improved as much as you guys have. Your voice has gotten better, there’s horns and Alex’s drumming is insane. I was just thinking how funny it is that in the last 16 years that you’ve been a band, you guys have improved so much and the country has not. It’s really not that hard to get better if you’re trying to get better. 

Practice makes perfect [laughs]. It’s one of those things where I probably would’ve been happy to make No Passion All Technique 15 times in a row. I was happy. But that’s the good thing about this band, they’re like, “OK, let’s try to get better at this.” With Alex’s drumming, I never knew he was a good—or great—drummer until people were like, “what is he doing? I don’t know what he’s doing,” on that tiny kit, every song. And he forces himself to do that.

And Greg forces himself like, “OK, I want this one to have a lot of trumpets on it. I don’t even know how to write for trumpets, but I just hear it,” and that kind of moving forward is what keeps bands like us together for as long as we’ve been a band. People always say, no matter how much it changes, I’m still yelling over the top of it, so it still sounds like Protomartyr [laughs].

Greg does have a pretty singular guitar sound when it’s that sound. There’re a couple parts on the record where it’s that sound. 

Yeah, but he dislikes the guitar, or he doesn’t wanna rely on it. The worst thing you can say to Greg is, “you guys are a post-punk band,” he absolutely hates it. [Greg voice] “No! I don’t even like post-punk.”

Well “Converts” almost sounds like a U2 song. And I’m not even a huge U2 fan, but there are songs like “Numb” where Edge is just doing some really weird, left-field shit, where you’re like, “well that’s new, that doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard in my life.”

[laughs] Yeah, “Converts” is written around a pedal that Greg got. So it’s kind of very Edge-like. He made a loop or something and was like, “this sounds weird, right?” We’re like, “Oh yeah, let’s make a song around that.”

“Checking Out” was one of those things where I just wanted to listen to it a bunch of times in a row and get lost in it. Your crooning was particularly good on that one. 

[laughs] I think it’s just because we work with producers who know how to zhuzh my voice up a little bit, or they know how to mold it. Because that’s always frustrated me, like, “I gotta sing?”

Surely you’ve worked at it a little?

No, no. This is me working at it right here. [holds up his High Life and Marlboro Light] This is me tuning my instrument. [we laugh]

It works, man, don’t fix it. So does the band being spread out make things harder? Does it feel like a different project, or does it still feel like it did before? 

Nah, it’s different now. Because in the early days, we’d just hang out all the time and dick around. Practice would be, like, watching a movie for a couple hours and then doing something else. So this is obviously different, where we have a limited time together, so Greg will be working on stuff ahead of time and then come back and do things. Kind of the way it works now is the time we have is precious to us. 

You just meet up every now and then in person? 

Yeah. I think for this record Greg had to work on stuff, since both Alex and I have kids. So he had to do all the music all by himself—usually he bounces stuff off of us more. But we’ve been doing this enough where he can bring stuff to us and he kind of knows the music that Alex can drum to and the stuff I can sing to, that sort of thing. 

When you moved, was there ever a thought of going somewhere else, or are you just locked into Detroit? 

I’m locked in, yeah. My wife is from Phoenix, which luckily that’s a worse city than Detroit [laughs]. In my estimation. It’s way too hot. So I convinced her to move here. And, as far as places go, it’s more affordable. When I was younger, I thought I’d move, but that kinda dried up. I’m stuck here now. 

Stuck.

I mean, where else would I go? 

That’s kind of where I am now. In the last five or so years, I realized I don’t think it gets much better, really. I kinda love it here, mostly. 

The good outweighs the bad, I think. 

Not to make you talk about ego, or whatever, but when you go to a show at Outer Limits, are you conscious of like, “everyone in here knows I’m Joe from Protomartyr”?

No. There’s a better chance of that happening at Outer Limits, but the good thing about being in a band like Protomartyr is you walk a block from where you’re playing and nobody knows who you are. I remember, before The White Stripes really blew up, you’d see Jack White around at shows, but you wouldn’t...who gives a shit? [laughs] I think that’s just a Detroit attitude. I think that’s a benefit. Even if they like your band, they’re not gonna be super excited that you’re there. It’s not that big of a deal. 

So how do you feel about the new record? I know a lot of bands finish an album and say, “this is the best thing we’ve ever done,” and a lot will say, “well this is probably the last album we’ll ever make.”

Well, I don’t know what to make of a record until years later, then I can be like, “that was a good one.” Until it comes out, it’s like it doesn’t exist or something. I’m one of those people where I really wanna start working on the next thing right away. Unfortunately that’s not how this band operates. Which is probably a good thing. But I’m always very happy with them, I’m never like, “Oh, that was a stinker,” [laughs] but I’m always a little nervous how it’ll be received. 

And with a band like yours, you have that long wait. “The rollout.” You don’t get to drop it on Bandcamp right when you finish it. 

Yeah, it’s annoying. A year ago right now we were in western New York starting to record the record. So we’ve been sitting with these songs for that long. You write these lyrics about things and you’re hoping like, “I hope JD Vance is still around when this shit comes out. [we laugh] You know, you hope he doesn’t die, oddly enough, or that something terrible happens and they’re like, “why’d you write this terrible song about JD Vance? He’s an American hero!” The news cycle changes so fast, you know, that’s why you can’t be so specific. You have to be vague when you write these lyrics. You don’t want it to be super dated. 

Bringing it back to the Detroit scene, I know you were going to a ton of shows when you were younger, are there highlight shows that you remember? 

Yeah. Before I was in Protomartyr, I was going to shows a lot. And I was friends with the guys in Tyvek, so I’d go to all their shows and I’d videotape shows. I remember the X! Fest at the old Bohemian Hall, and seeing Simply Saucer play there once, that was good. I remember one time going to the Magic Stick and we were downstairs drinking and it was like, “Oh, the Dictators are playing upstairs, just go up, we wanna fill up the room,” and that was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. Seeing the re-formed Rocket From the Tombs, that was good. I think everybody has those kind of shows around here. I’m assuming it would be Paris Bar or Outer Limits—where’s the place where the best shows are happening? 

Outer Limits is my favorite right now. The Outer Limits Devil’s Night show last year was one of my favorite shows I’ve been to ever, it was just so fun. Something about the Halloween shows is sort of corny to me in a really fun way, and when everyone commits to it and it sounds good, it’s special. I love the lighting, I love the layout there. 

It’s sad, because Lager House used to be the place to see shows, because it has a good layout where you could be at the bar if you didn’t wanna see the show, the people from the bar weren’t interrupting the show. I haven’t seen a show there in a while. I got married at Outer Limits, so I appreciate it. I like the big backyard. 

Yeah, the patio’s awesome. 

That’s the thing, from touring around, I’m always like, “I hope the venues in Detroit are as good as you sometimes find on the road.” Sometimes touring you’re like, “What no green room? No backstage bathroom?” And then you play Detroit and you’re like, “Oh, there’s none of that.” [laughs]  Or barely any of that.

Is Kelley Deal still involved in any capacity? 

Not for this tour. Our fifth member is going to be Fred Thomas again. Unfortunately—or fortunately, it’s nice that we’re writing music—we need more people in the band to play these songs. For years we played songs where we just needed the four of us. Now we need someone to play synths or trumpet hopefully. 

I saw Stef Chura at Blowout and some guy was playing trumpet for a song and it was great!

She really was lobbying hard to be like, “We can play trumpet, have us open up.” Our trick was like, I don’t really know if we can afford a trumpet player for the whole tour, but if we had an opening band that had a trumpet player in it, and even better if they didn’t play trumpet in that band. So we don’t have to tour with a trumpet player [laughs].

Her new stuff’s awesome.  

She astounds me, because she’s definitely one of the biggest strivers in the scene. She took a break for five years and then immediately was like, “I’m back! I’m going to open up for Dinosaur Jr” [laughs].

And you guys were on Urinal Cake together. That’s one of the coolest t-shirts I still have, my Urinal Cake Records shirt. 

Oh god, we hated the logo. On our first single, he’s like, “every album’s gotta be pink, like a urinal cake!” And we’re like, “OK, fine.” And then, from that point on, no other band had to do it and we’re like, “What the fuck, man!” Is there currently a Detroit label...I guess 7” labels are kind of dead now. But when we were starting out, there was X! and there was Urinal Cake.

Outer Limits has a little label, but that’s sort of a special thing. Painters Tapes is awesome, but that’s just tapes. Their logo is great.

Yeah, that’s a tasteful logo. It’s not piss all over a fucking urinal. 

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