Album Review Protomartyr - Ultimate Success Today

Cold, wet and miserable. Long nights filled with nothing. Nothing at all. It’s the start of summer and Protomartyr are back with the soundtrack to the apocalypse. With ‘Ultimate Success Today’, Joe Casey and co have served up 10 tracks of heavy, tinnitus-inducing post-punk that has never sounded so relevant. In the past it has felt like the group have been living in a sort of “worst case scenario” alternate universe, but with this, their fifth studio album, the timelines have crossed. The world has caught up with the group’s bleak outlook, and all is not well. The dread-fuelled Nick Cave stomp of ‘Processed By The Boys’ clash with epics like ‘I Am You Now’ and ‘Modern Business Hymns’ to create a record that sounds so much like the deflated “now” that it almost hurts. This is 2020 in pained, reverb dripping sound waves. This is the isolation. This is the pandemic. This is everything. The doom may have arrived, but at least Protomartyr are back in our lives.