Protomartyr make music for fistfights in dim alleyways; the Detroit post-punk group’s sound lashes out with confrontational ferocity and acerbically urges discontent, and as with fistfights in dim alleyways, circumstances of emotional compromise often underlie. Last year’s Under the Color of Official Right was the immediate culmination of anguish in Protomartyr’s two-album discography (as of then) with vignettes of vengeance from abandoned children and other harrowing subject matters, and their third full length The Agent Intellect furthers the distress.

The band has a knack for openers as made evident to me by “Maidenhead”, the initial cut of Under the Color from which the somnolent guitar riff ricocheted around my mind for a few weeks. “The Devil in His Youth”, the inaugural piece of the new record, is quick to establish the album’s lugubrious demeanor. As with “Maidenhead”, the song is one of my favorites and easily one of the most memorable from the album. It sets a high bar on all fronts, as every piece of instrumentation, including Joe Casey’s vocals, is performed with a hellfire paced thrash as to create the stringent wildness that characterizes Protomartyr so effectively. The lyrics are most chilling, the most profound of which Casey cries out near the back end of the track: “‘You will feel the way I do, you will hurt the way I do’ / He was easily abused, the devil in his youth.”

Despite the wonderful opener, the band doesn’t quite seize their ability to create ardent songs with as much excellence as the first later on the album; the altercations Protomartyr choreograph places nearly all jabs, uppercuts, and finishing blows the same. In regards to instrumentation, The Agent Intelligent is bolstered throughout by guitars drowsy with reverb yet executed with a serrated edge, fervent levels of distortion and an often used eighth-note battering; the drums unfurl with the same precision as they do on previous Protomartyr albums, with each strike landing confidently and more urgent than the last; the reflexive bass lines, though sometimes unremarkable sufficiently emphasize the almost ubiquitous gloom created.

If anything, Protomartyr have made headway from comfortable to confident in this region, writing songs that have that familiar black cloud of despair and contingency no longer lurking but oozing from every seam of the ominous situations entailed. “Boyce or Boice” is wary of the alarming omnipresence of fraud and debauchery prominent in the Internet age, with Casey snarling “Your secret lovers exist as numbers… They know our movements / they own our failures.” As many other Protomartyr songs, “Uncle Mother’s” tales the negligence of deadbeat fathers retreating to the bars, but in this instance leaving their children alone in the car. One theme present in some instances is the conniving animus of religion in Casey’s experiences. The buoyant head-bobber “Pontiac 87” recalls the scheming and underlying cynicism of a Papal visit to Michigan, and he later pays a visit to his regular bar Jumbo’s, watching his “fake friends” pile up seeking appeasement just as those who sought the Pope.

In this landscape of prosaic despondency, an occasional rupture in formula is vastly appreciated. One of my personal favorites from the release, “I Forgive You”, immediately slugs a chummy riff substituting a jagged synth for  the bass, an unforeseen change in instrumentation alongside Casey discoursing to himself in the style of Sleaford Mods. “Dope Cloud”, more compelling than its partner single “Why Does It Shake?”, starts with a languorous half-time beat phasing in and out of the characteristic vigor. At the chorus, enveloping ambient synths shroud themselves under everything else, a subtle nuance in pieces so combatively forefront.

The aforementioned “Dope Cloud” approaches the riches held in the “pockets of the undeserving” with a dismal hopelessness. After the blunt line, “That’s not gonna save you, man”, Casey proposes the rhetorical “What will?” That “what will” is the hearth of Protomartyr’s central ideology on The Agent Intellect, the sentience of that nagging qualm in commonplace occurrences and the subsequent doldrums. From this notion the band functions on all ends, thusly in exploring and establishing such boding vehemence, they’ve lost their taste for anything else

Hardly Art Records / Protomartyr