protomartyr

Protomartyr share new single "Worm in Heaven," postpone album, cancel tour

Good news and bad news from the Protomartyr camp. First some bad: due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the band’s new album Ultimate Success Today has been pushed back from May 29 to July 17 via Domino. On the plus side, they’ve just shared a second single from the album, the somber, understated “Worm in Heaven,” a slow-build of a song that has Joe Casey singing “I am a worm in heaven / so close to grace / could lick it off of the boot heels of the blessed” as the song grows in intensity.

The song comes with a video made by Trevor Naud (who used to front Zoos of Berlin) who, inspired by Chris Marker’s influential 1962 film La Jetée, created it from a series of still images. “I’d been experimenting with shooting multiples of still photographs and stitching them together so that there’s subtle movement,” explains Naud, “almost like a 3-D camera effect, but awkward and sort of unsettling–like looking at a photograph under shallow water. I shot upwards of 700 still frames on a Nikon F Photomic camera. I embraced the lines and artifacts from the film scans, which give a sort of Xerox quality to some of the images. All the special effects were done in-camera using mirrors, projectors and magnifying glasses.” It’s a striking, disquieting video and you can watch that below.

In more bad, but not exactly surprising news, Protomartyr’s North American tour, which was to have happened in June, has been scrapped but the band says they hope to be on the road as soon as it’s safe to do so. We hope that too.