100 Greatest Songs of the 2010’s #28 Protomartyr – The Devil In His Youth

Released : 2015

Detroit has had many sons, but few have come more when chosen by it than Joe Casey, a singer in the old tradition of stern indiscipline, a man who walks the city’s lines, in and out of it’s crumbling edifices and emptied suburban myths.

The Devil In His Youth is the sort of caterwhauling punk foment his band do so well, provocatively observing the acerbic, brittle conscience of an America which has built a wall through the middle of it’s own society. The subject is an adolescent who finds himself compromised by his own false sense of superiority, a fool who sees nothing, hears nothing but says everything.

Casey slices through a little horror story that is the tale of a million young men growing up rootless, radicalised by one faction or another, whilst guitarist Greg Ahee scores the song’s edges with abrasive, flailing riffs. Michigan has never sounded better.