In 2020, at the early height of the Covid pandemic, there was a stretch when Protomartyr frontman Joe Casey questioned if the Detroit post-punk band even had a future.
“You couldn���t tour, and we’re not the kind of band that can hang out on Zoom and practice. We’re just not built that way,” Casey said by phone in early June. “And financially, creatively, we were just sucked dry by it. … There’s only so many T-shirts you can sell online. So, at that point it did seem like maybe you needed to start to rethink your whole life.”
These feelings intensified amid the stagnation that set in following the July 2020 release of the band’s fifth album, Ultimate Success Today, an anxious, grimly apocalyptic record that felt weirdly in-tune with the bleak times in which it landed. Unable to tour in support of the LP, the members of Protomartyr retreated to their separate corners, with guitarist Greg Ahee briefly relocating to Chicago and Casey holing up in the family home in Detroit, where he navigated a grief brought about by a series of personal tragedies, including the death of his mother, Ellen, who died following a long battle with Alzheimer’s.
And then, gradually, the weather started to break. Restrictions on touring lifted. And Casey, newly equipped with an understanding of how it feels when the bottom completely drops out, began to take a different tact in his writing.
“We were coming off a record that I consider fairly dark. But then going through Covid, you realize things can get worse, and I can be more depressed,” said Casey, who will join his Protomartyr bandmates in concert at Natalie’s Grandview on Wednesday, June 19. “So, coming out of that, you have to find some hope somewhere. Or if not hope, at least something to strive for.”
This idea percolates through Protomartyr’s 2023 full-length, Formal Growth in the Desert, surfacing most cleanly in a two-song arc Casey penned about his late mom. The first of these, “Graph Vs. Host,” emerged in the immediate aftermath of her death, when the emotions of the moment were almost unbearably raw. “I found out my mom had died, and I was over at my brother’s house, and we were sitting waiting for the ambulance to show up and for them to tell us we were correct in assuming that she was dead,” Casey said. “And I remember being like, okay, I need to remember how I feel in this moment, because I don’t want to be removed from it.”
The deep weight of this grief echoes in the opening lines of “Graph Vs. Host.” “In an empty room where love once was,” Casey intones in a melodic sing-speak cadence. “Sadness running through my mind.”
As the album nears its end, though, Casey revisits his mother’s passing with the benefit of distance on “The Author,” a comparatively optimistic turn that stands among the prettiest tunes in the band’s towering catalog.
“And that one is hopefully what you get from someone’s passing. You’re never going to get them back, but you can take their story or their life and what they meant to you, and then hopefully apply it, where you can maybe see improvement in your own life,” said Casey, who in recent years has pushed himself to try and emulate his mom’s more outgoing personality, describing her as someone who readily engaged the world around her – something he has always struggled with as an introvert by nature.
While the band members never communicated these emotions directly with one another – “We don’t sit around and talk about our feelings; we’re kind of walled off in that way,” Casey said – Ahee arrived at early writing sessions with musical tracks that instinctively occupied these divergent headspaces. As a result, when Casey listened to the instrumentation for “Graph Vs. Host,” the track’s hollowed out feel sent him reeling back to those initial hours in his brother’s home.
“And then ‘The Author’ was very beautiful and very uplifting, almost, which is rare for a Protomartyr song,” Casey said. “And I thought, well, this is a good way to show there are multiple ways to think about things.”
The idea of love is one to which the frontman returns throughout the record, owing in part to his recent marriage, which occurred years after he had reached a point in life when he questioned if that reality would ever come to pass. “When I was in my 20s it was like, ‘Oh, someday when I have kids, blah, blah, blah.’ I’m at the age now where it’s like, ‘If I have kids,’” . “’Oh, when I get married.’ Am I going to get married? I have no idea now.”
These doubts creep into the close of “Polacrilex Kid,” with Casey repeating the line, “Can you hate yourself and still deserve love?”
A counter arrives with the album-closing “Rain Garden,” a relatively straightforward love song set in the parking lot behind a coney dog stand littered with discarded, half-full cups of Mountain Dew. “I am deserving of love,” Casey sings, a few bars later adding, “Love has found me.”
“I think everybody wants to be loved or thinks they deserve it, but you have to be happy with yourself, unfortunately, before you can let somebody else in,” Casey said. “And that was always a thing with me. It’s like that Tim Robinson sketch: ‘I used to be a piece of shit.’ My worst critic is me, and it was learning to temper that, because you’re not going to be able to love somebody or receive love if you secretly hate yourself.”
