Protomartyr are letting in the light

Yes, it was recorded in the small Texan border town of Tornillo, on the edge of a literal desert. Yes, it’s named after a painting of donkeys in the desert from Maxfield Parrish’s series The Great Southwest. And yes, themes traditionally associated with the desert (isolation, solitude, awe) are all present. But as far as Casey is concerned it’s an album about Detroit. “With a band like us, who usually only have two weeks to record, the studio doesn’t affect the songwriting,” he says. “We could have recorded it on the moon and it wouldn’t be a ‘moon album’. It’s a Detroit album, like all the rest of them.”

Besides Casey, the core of Protomartyr includes guitarist (amongst other things) Greg Ahee, drummer Alex Leonard and bassist Scott Davidson, and it’s been that way since they formed in 2010. Co-produced by Ahee and Joe Aron (Snail Mail, Orion Sun), Formal Growth in the Desert is the band’s sixth studio album and it represents something of a rebirth

Having rounded off their first decade with 2020’s Ultimate Success Today – a good fit for the first wave of the pandemic with its eerily prescient visions of a world in chaos – Casey felt that a new phase was coming, though in what form he didn’t know. In previous interviews, he’s flippantly referenced the traditional five-act structure of a Shakespearean tragedy to explain his thinking, but it seems he wasn’t entirely joking. “I said that it was the end of something because I wanted to give us a backdoor into trying something else,” he admits.

To pass through that door without losing their core strengths required some deep thinking about the band’s future, and Casey credits Kelley Deal of The Breeders for being a catalyst in that. Having recorded with Protomartyr in 2015 (“Blues Festival”) and again in 2018 on their Consolation EP, Deal first joined the band as a touring member just before the Covid shutdowns bit. As Casey explains, “Kelley helped us get out of our stupor because right when we found out everything was closing down, we managed to get one show in with her. A year and a half later, she called us and said that if we were touring again, she still wanted in.”

Deal’s interest not only brought the band full circle, but it also offered them a way out of their near demise. Optimism is not a word traditionally associated with Casey and co., but Deal’s willingness to follow the band to the ends of the Earth just for the hell of it was inspiring, and it made a significant impression. “[The songs] ended up being quite positive, at least lyrically, because so much bad shit has happened,” he says, alluding not only to the extended hell of the pandemic but also to the passing of his mother and a series of break-ins that forced him to move home.

“The last record was all about sickness and death, and we reached the end of that sort of thing,” he says. “The usual Protomartyr thing of building up tension and not releasing it just didn’t fly. I realised that I’m pretty good at writing about depression and wanted to try something else.” What massively helped was the fact that the band intuitively picked up on Casey’s mood. “The band was ready to write some songs that were more hopeful, without being ‘Here’s the answers to all your problems.’”

Digging into the album’s dozen songs, Casey offers some specific comments about where that hopefulness can be found. Aware of how certain stylistic changes might be construed as niche or passing interests, he’s keen to clarify that the experiments on Formal Growth in the Desert were something all four members were committed to, not least because it keeps things interesting for them. He’s particularly pleased with the addition of pedal steel guitar on the album. “What I like about it is that it can sound very warm and happy, almost jaunty, one minute and something very spacey the next. Part of the reason we recorded the album in Texas is that you can trip over a pedal steel player there.”

Touching on album highlight “Make Way”, he’s glad when I point out that the song has an Iggy Pop in Berlin kind of looseness to it. “For a band who started out as a punk band, barely able to play their instruments, finding a groove or a swagger is something hard to come by,” he says. “People either have it or they don’t a lot of the time, but one thing we can do is an awkward, robotic, moving back-and-forth kind of thing. It took us a while to figure it out, and it’s something that other bands seem to be able to do in their sleep.”

Elsewhere, the pummelling “3800 Tigers” unexpectedly doubles as a solemn judgement on the state of the planet (3800 is the estimated number of tigers left in the world) and a song dedicated to Casey’s beloved baseball team, the Detroit Tigers. “The last time they won a World Series was back in 1984,” he says, humbly. “I was born in 1977, so I saw them when they were good, and it made me a fan for life. The rest of the band support Detroit teams and none of them have been any good in over 20 years. You have to have a certain sort of attitude if you’re a fan of these teams, and I think that shows in our songs.”

Casey has learned from experience that he and the band are incapable to figuring out what their music sounds like to other people outside of the band. They’ll often have one influence in mind and try to emulate that, only to stumble into their own way of doing things. Casey tells a story about an early attempt, years ago, to write a song that sounded like Thin Lizzy, only to end up making something “completely in the opposite direction.” It’s one he’s spoken about before but it’s never felt more relevant than now. Take album closer “Rain Garden”, for instance. It’s still recognisably Protomartyr but at the same time it’s unlike anything else in their catalogue, having started with just a title and growing into an enormous sounding, cinematic epic.

Spend enough time talking to Casey about influences and he’s bound to bring up his heroes The Fall. Back in 2010, he might have sold a kidney given the chance to open for them on tour, but in retrospect he’s glad it never happened. “When Mark E. Smith was still on this planet I hoped nobody would tell him [about how much he influenced Protomartyr] because he’d probably fucking hate us,” he says, laughing. “We were meant to open for them on a short run but it was just before he got ill, and in some ways it’s a massive relief. I’d also hate for him to think we owe him some money. There’s at least one song on [Pavement’s debut] Slanted and Enchanted that sounds exactly like The Fall – did they get paid anything for that?”

Thirteen years into their career, Protomartyr have long since moved away from trying to sound like anyone but themselves. Casey says the inspiration they take from The Fall now is how to grow old as a band – how to continually shift style and focus, but never for reasons other than staying engaged with the music and motivated to keep the band going. “We use The Fall as a model [for that]. Wire and Pere Ubu, too. They’re all bands that are easy to think you can rip off, but the closer you look at their careers you understand that they continued to push themselves, to make new music, and refused to play the same old shit every night.”

At the suggestion that Protomartyr and contemporaries like Preoccupations, Parquet Courts and Iceage have played an integral part in the current post-punk renaissance in the UK and Ireland, Casey’s mood turns to one of wry resignation. “With all of those new bands, I wish that we earned as much money or had a similar level of success,” he says. “It’s interesting that when we came up, people would suggest that we were ripping off Joy Division, which wasn’t really true. But what really hurts is that young people might think we’re ripping off one of these newer bands.”

When I ask if there are any of those newer bands that he particularly likes, he offers two. “Do you know Gilla Band? Every new record sounds completely fresh and original and I really appreciate that. Nobody sounds like them and I’m always impressed with what they put out. I also really like Shame because we got to tour with them a while ago. We thought it was going to be terrible but they actually turned out to be really nice guys. It sounds like they’ve tried to push themselves over the three albums and try to do something different every time.”

Asked whether he believes that Protomartyr will leave any kind of legacy as an influence on bands completely unlike themselves, Casey admits he finds it a strange thing to consider. “Apparently in some interview Paramore said they listened to us while they were making the new album,” he says. “One of my friends who keeps a close eye on gossip blogs messaged me saying that Taylor Swift’s guitar player was wearing one of our shirts at a concert, and that was a special moment. The first taste of that rarefied air.”

As for the influence, he doesn’t see it himself, although he doesn’t completely dismiss it: “For them to sound like us, [Hayley Williams] would have to fuck up her voice or something. She’d have to take a bat to her vocal cords… it’s probably not going to happen.”

Casey might wish for more success but he’s grateful to be able to look back on the band’s achievements with a clear head. “Nostalgia is toxic,” he says – a perfectly Protomartyr soundbite – “so one of the best things about talking to fans at our shows is that there’s no set favourite album. They seem to like each of them equally, which is great. That’s the best thing about not having any hits. They’re all hits, in a way.”

Pressed on whether he thinks Formal Growth… will become a favourite among these same fans, and maybe make them some new ones, his response is optimistic. “Whenever people write our press kit, I always want them to say that it’s our best album ever, so that interviewers will ask me why it’s our best album to date. But I really do think this is our best. My favourite will always be the first one, but make sure you tell everyone that this one is definitely the best.”