On stages worldwide, the band's singer, Joe Casey, has swaggered as little as possible while dripping softly spoken bile into the microphone. Mostly stories of distant cities, diseases blooming out of reach, ballads of dope clouds, and shadowy forces slowly slipping in.

Protomartyr have always been concerned with the absurd, the terrible, and the apocalyptic, but is their first record that truly lives in it: not a world of noise and terror, not even a nation or city, just a smoky room where the wretched lie praying under dim light to eagle-haired false prophets.

America is a hotel on the band's fourth album for Domino Records: a damp, soon-to-be-foreclosed building where management no longer cares about overblown radiators, mouldy walls, and sprung leaks. What's left behind are the voices in the rooms, the sounds aching down the wire. Doomsday is here, says Casey, and we’re all its guests, checked in long past a time we can remember, too used to the comforts of our crumbling empire to dare try and leave.

You might expect this moment to be captured through screams and distortion. You might expect this album to be Protomartyr’s grand reckoning, one where the cymbal smashes and angular slashes rain down on the audience, or an album of distortion where Casey screeches louder than ever, naming and shaming every aspect of the decaying American empire's syphilitic serpent.

does have those songs; the thrashing “Feed The Sewer” with its machine-gun drums and slamming guttural bass line might be the hardest track they’ve ever written. But for the most part, it's remarkably contemplative and lush, more concerned with the people slipping away within its walls than the bigger question of how we even got here. Protomartyr aren’t seeking answers; those are obvious by now.

Now working with legendary neo-psych producer Dave Fridmann, the band haven’t so much changed their sound as expanded upon it. In the past, Protomartyr’s setup prioritised minimalism: Alex Leonard’s stripped-back drums working alongside Scott Davidson's churning bass to set the stage for Casey’s musings and Greg Ahee’s guitar architecture.

Sometimes the production merely fleshes out these elements, pushing the band's songs till they breach the atmosphere. “The Sounds We Cannot Hear” is classic Protomartyr, moody verses paving the way for climactic choruses made massive by Fridmann, while Ahee’s guitar work takes on psychedelic qualities, the sheer size of the sound transforming his subtle note choices into overwhelming walls of sound.

More often, though, Fridmann's production loosens and limbers the band up for more atmospheric compositions. Part of that atmosphere comes from the additional instruments. “The Knife Dream” crawls in a limbo between trip hop and dark jazz, with a piano that lays down twinkles of suspense like rain on a hot tin roof.

Yet the biggest instrumental addition is the saxophone. It haunts the songs, adding a noirish heft that reframes Casey as a weary detective sipping whiskey by the hotel bar as he recalls cases taken from a pre-collapse world. It glistens across most of the album's tracks like a distant siren call, lying gently over the breakdown of opener “The Old Hotel” to lend a sense of melancholy to the proceedings. Melancholy is its main emotion, echoing like breaths panting through the walls. It carries out the coffin at the end of “Converts” and blares in the back of “Lavender Gospel” like a distant alarm.

Make no mistake, though, what makes the band's best work in over a decade isn’t purely the production. It’s how it interacts with the band's evolved songwriting. The songs just seem to unspool. “Exalted Eagles” merges industrial rock and creeping samba rhythms into an imperial death march, while “Third Country” melds 1950s waltz and girl-group drumbeat into haunting hypnagogia. Pieces of old exotica and balladry dance alongside noise and tension, transforming the band’s post-punk into a vessel for something older and stranger.

Sometimes moves as a single mournful ballad; other times it feels like a radio signal broadcasting folk song from a future soon to come. Through it all, Casey remains Protomartyr's guiding light. His lyricism is hypermodern, touching on AI and “crypto ballrooms” amid character studies of finance bros and fascist rallies with equal disdain. His dense lexis, too obtuse to be conversational yet too precise to be pretentious, is the least changed element of Protomartyr, but here it works all the better.

Under dim hotel lights, Casey’s lyricism appears foreboding and alien in a way it never has before. Disconnected from its lit-punk beginnings, his poetry feels more spectral than concrete: less stories, more messages – the warning signs we ignored mixed with the fears we refuse to face.