The Agent Intellect

Description

This October marks the release of The Agent Intellect, Protomartyrs third and finest work to date. Named after an ancient philosophical questioning of how the mind operates in relation to the self, its an elegant and often devastating display of all that makes Protomartyr so vital and singularly visceral an outfit. Over the course of several months, Greg Ahee waded through more than a hundred song fragments until he reached the bottomless melodies of I Forgive You and Clandestine Time, the inky depths of Pontiac 87 and titanic churn of Why Does It Shake? Lyrically, Casey is at his most confident and haunting. He humanizes evil on The Devil in His Youth, and, amid the charred pop of Dope Cloud, he reassures us that nothingnot God, not moneycan or will prevent our minds from unraveling until we finally fade away. We are no one and nothing, he claims, without our thoughts. Its a theme that echoes through the entirety of the record, but never as beautifully as it does on Ellen. Named after his mother and written from the perspective of his late father, its as romantic a song as youre likely to hear this or any year, Casey promising to wait for her on the other side, with the memories shes lost safely in hand.