Fighting Technology and Kombucha and Complacency with Protomartyr

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The Michigan post-punk band Protomartyr played a gig in Las Vegas on Election Night in 2016. Like many Americans, the guys in the band woke up the next morning depressed and hungry. Before hitting the road, they stopped for breakfast at Whole Foods, where the lead singer, Joe Casey, looked around. “It just struck me,” he said recently. “We were all in this depressed mood going into Whole Foods and seeing people with big smiles on their faces buying their very expensive groceries, they didn’t seem like they had a care in the world.”

Casey writes lyrics about the lives of the working class and dystopian visions from the heartland. His father had a job at the water-waste and sewerage department in Detroit, and Casey remembers the inequities that separated the poverty-stricken inner city from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe. “The line between them is just a block, but it’s stark in the differences between the two cities,” he said. While crisscrossing America on tour, Casey noticed the same disparity all over the country. “You kind of wonder, why is this city so wealthy and the one next to it is so poor, and how do they keep it that way?”

That morning at Whole Foods, after Donald Trump was elected President, Casey saw a shopper buy an eight-dollar bottle of kombucha, and the scene helped inspire the lyrics on the song “Don’t Go to Anacita,” off Protomartyr’s new album, “Relatives In Descent.” Anacita is a fictional coastal town created by Casey. He compares it to a very rich community on the West Coast. “The liberal-minded here close their eyes and dream of technology and kombucha,” Casey sings in his raspy, stiff-necked voice. In the music video, vagrants scrub floors and are discarded as they attempt to climb an endless Escher-like staircase. (It was directed by Yoonha Park, and inspired by the Polish filmmaker Zbigniew Rybczyński’s “Stairway to Lenin.”)

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Casey said that the band had to pass Trump Tower while driving out of Vegas that morning. “It’s been a really depressing year,” he said. “You kind of want to talk about your feeling and what’s causing it, and know that a lot of the problems that you’re talking about won’t stop once the President is out of office.”

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