Hotel Usona (LP)

Recorded with legendary producer Dave Fridmann (Nick Cave, MGMT, The Flaming Lips) at his own Tarbox Road Studios in western New York, Hotel Usona-Protomartyr's seventh full-length studio album-is an effort that finds the Detroit post-punk outfit reckoning with the horrors of our current moment. It is not easy listening.

It's essential.

Over the last two decades, Protomartyr-vocalist Joe Casey, drummer Alex Leonard, bassist Scott Davidson, guitarist-multi-instrumentalist and co-producer Greg Ahee-have built one of the most rewarding and often exhilarating bodies of work in recent memory by veering in and out of darkness, grappling with what most frightens us, saddens us, disgusts us, embarrasses and enrages us. The stuff that makes us human.