At SXSW 2014, before Kelley Deal joined the Detroit-based post-punk band Protomartyr, she met guitarist Greg Ahee and the rest of the band when she was trapped behind a stuck door in a backstage bathroom.
“We heard pounding on the door and it took a while to actually get the door open,” Ahee says. “We immediately became really good friends with her. We love her to death.
“Her sense of melody is unlike anyone I've ever played with. She'll run everything – her keyboard, her guitar, and her vocals – all through the same pedal chain and she makes it sound unbelievable regardless of what she's putting through it.”
Deal and Protomartyr parted ways, clearly amicably, back in 2024, with the band replacing Deal with multi-instrumentalist Fred Thomas of the neighboring band Tyvek. In fact, it was Tyvek who helped get the band out of Detroit.
“Our friends liked us, but nobody thought that we would make it outside of Detroit, including ourselves,” he says. “Joe [Casey, vocals], was hanging out with our good friends Tyvek, and through them he met Ruben Mendez, who worked at Hardly Art. Once we had a few songs recorded, Ruben gave it to the people at Hardly Art.”
The band just released their seventh record, Hotel Usona. It’s their fourth on Domino Records since leaving Hardly Art after 2015’s The Agent Intellect. When Ahee was writing the record, he was inspired by a book that he’d read about 1950s exotica music.
“Guys like Les Baxter and Martin Denny, who made easy listening music in a post-war setting,” he says. “I’d be writing the album and go into the other room and watch a genocide happen [and,] seeing like Trump post AI slop of Gaza as this beach town, it reminded me of what exotica music was supposed to be – trying to sterilize these horrors in a way that made them palatable.”
Ahee’s weapon of choice on Hotel Usona was his Reverend Jetstream. The three P-90 pickups were a challenge for him at first – “I usually use humbuckers just to get a heavier sound,” he says.
“I never used P-90s before this Reverend guitar, but I'm loving how it sounds. I haven't even really experimented with all three pickups, but at some point I'll get around to actually like blending them. It’s not fun if I’m not challenging myself.”
- Hotel Usona is out now via Domino.
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
