Prostitute are catalysing anger into action: “Everything’s in free fall, so let’s jump”
Formed in Dearborn, Michigan, America’s only Arab-majority city, Prostitute’s 2024 debut, Attempted Martyr, was a bracing response to a nation in freefall. As they prepare to re-release the album – and ready its followup – the band are poised to channel their energy into something more constructive: action.
When Michigan noiseniks Prostitute self-released their debut album Attempted Martyr back in 2024, they captured the mood of a world on the brink – quite literally. Within a month, Trump was re-elected president. He wasted no time in amassing unprecedented executive power and weaponising shock: dismantling the federal government, turning the judiciary against his political enemies and launching a militarised mass deportation programme, all within his first 100 days. Now, as the band prepare to re-release the album after signing to Mute, Trump’s immigration enforcement agents are murdering people in broad daylight. “When the album came out, things were starting to get scarier,” says drummer Andrew Kaster, calling with the band from a studio in Detroit where they’re piecing together their next record. “As the past year has shown, it doesn’t look like it’s getting any better.”
Prostitute formed in Dearborn, Michigan, in 2020, and the turmoil of that moment remains ingrained in the psyche of the band – as well as the world at large. Their provocative name is intended as a verb rather than noun: whether prostituting yourself to capitalism, to God – or the intellectual prostitution of the grifter. The songs on Attempted Martyr are anxious and precarious, frantic and furious, a deluge of experimental aggression that offers a uniquely global spin on noise rock. The band, made up of Lebanese, Polish, Roma and Maltese members, critique xenophobic stereotypes that have festered in the long shadow of US foreign policy. Loosely adopting the persona of a zealot, they sample Middle Eastern, East Asian and West African sounds – from dabke and Japanese experimental rock to a recitation of a Muslim prayer, the latter removed from streaming sites due to clearance issues – over a wall of distorted guitar, drums and synth. The end result is dense, intense, hellbent on shock.
Live, they’re furiously good fun, as attested by two sold-out nights at London’s Windmill last autumn. “I wasn’t expecting it to sell out, first of all,” bassist Dylan Zaranski says. “Then actually being there, the reception of the people… There was this girl basically being lifted into heaven. I was watching her going through the ceiling. All these people were holding her up.”
The band fed off the validation of finding an international audience who connected to their politics, and in return the audience found a positive outlet for their own anger. “We didn’t have to bring it out of them,” Kaster smiles. “They brought it out of us.”
In 2023, Dearborn became the first Arab-majority city in the United States and is home to the country’s largest Lebanese American community – a community that includes the band’s producer and adviser Ali, who prefers to remain at a remove, as well as frontman Moe Kazra. They dedicate Attempted Martyr “to Lebanon, from Dearborn with love”. The album has only increased in resonance in 2026. “Now ICE are pulling people out of their homes in Dearborn,” Kaster says. “I’m not even Arab, but I worry. Am I going to be on a no-fly list? Am I going to be able to travel and make a living off of this? And that’s nothing compared to the worries Moe and Ali must have.” But he views any pressure to be less incendiary as an opportunity to be even more effective. “We’re not out here trying to proselytise, or go out with our manifesto, or read off our beliefs. It’s music. We want people to enjoy it. It starts with the body, and then it works its way into your brain. To me, that’s what’s actually subversive.”
Given the escalating severity and spread of ICE raids in Minneapolis and beyond, the atmosphere in Dearborn remains unpredictable. “Who knows who’s next?” Kaster asks. ICE have been spotted in the nearby cities of Royal Oak, Westland and Detroit. “You don’t know who’s going to piss off the president enough for him to send his goons into the streets. I never thought this stuff would be happening in my lifetime, but here we are.”
“In Royal Oak, there are actual citizens – normal people – who go out of their way to report anybody who might seem like an outsider,” Zaranski adds. “There’s this huge disconnect with the community. Everyone’s on edge. There’s no trust.”
“Everything is a grift. Everything is a shit-post. That term ‘post-truth’ gets thrown around. Everything has been reduced to: fuck sincerity, fuck truth. Whoever has the most powerful charisma aura will bend reality to fit their desires”
“Community has eroded in a lot of ways,” Kaster acknowledges. “But seeing everything going on in Minneapolis, people on the streets, that’s comforting. There’s still some civic sense left in people.” That sense of community – whether on the streets of Minneapolis, in punk and DIY scenes, or within the different ethnic communities the band belong to – is key to their next album: the power of music and live performance in bringing people together. It’s a sentiment that risks coming across as cheesy, but as Kaster says, “I think cheesy’s good!
“Everything is a grift. Everything is a shit-post. That term ‘post-truth’ gets thrown around. Everything has been reduced to: fuck sincerity, fuck truth. Whoever has the most powerful charisma aura will bend reality to fit their desires.” He pauses. “In a way, that’s what we’re trying to do. Use the same tools. Why not?”
The next album also finds fuel in the lived experiences of Ali, who’s spent most of his life in Lebanon. “Sometimes we’ll just sit around at practice and listen to him tell us stories, what life is like over there,” Kaster says. “In the west, oftentimes those voices get drowned out or ignored.
The new songs are at that fragile stage of conception that necessitates long hours in the studio, frayed tempers and fragmented experimentation. “We have sounds, we have samples, we have parts for songs, we have a couple of songs done, but this one is definitely much more of a puzzle,” Kaster says. “Making that first album was in some ways a little traumatic. The tensions that were necessary to bring life into it. We know that’s what we have to dive into again to make this next album.”
“With the first album, I quit after it was released,” Kazra interjects. “And during the making of the first album, Andrew quit three times.” It’s hardly surprising, given the enormous amount of emotion and intensity required to craft such songs. “I’m the motherfucker who took down the towers,” Kazra screams on the opening track, All Hail, and the lyrics remain inflammatory throughout, bristling with references to slaughter, beheading, open fire, flayed flesh. Guitar, drums and bass often sound at war with each other, a near-constant air of unhinged dissonance hanging over everything. And through it all stalks the figure of the zealot, “a prince to the grifters”, who wonders: “What am I worth if not / glorified and adorned in flames?”
No one has quit so far this time around. They’re too busy dialling up the volume, introducing more rap and new instruments. Lead guitarist Ross Babinski has been writing Arab-influenced melodies on a guitar strung and tuned like a banjo. “Taking that timbre and applying it to something angular, dancey,” Kaster says. “On the first album, you hear it in the sampling. But we want to get to a point where we’re not treating this as tourists, or like we’re mining a culture, but actually authentically engaging with these styles. As for the rest, it’s all up in the air, but we’re definitely leaning towards things being more electronic, more manipulated.”
“We’re trying to capture what was special about the first album, but now we’re turning it into a party,” he concludes. “The world sucks right now. We don’t want to compromise the things we want to talk about. We don’t want to downplay it or make it more palatable. But we don’t want to make miserable, depressing music about miserable, depressing things. Turn the energy into action, whether that’s dancing or what-have-you. Something you feel cathartic with.”
In April, Prostitute return to the UK and Europe for more shows. Given the bigger tours, their new home at Mute and the increased appetite for loud, political music – there are plenty of angry people in search of a punk band, if the recent rise of hardcore is anything to go by – they feel confident they won’t need their day jobs much longer. The world is on the brink of something scary. The band are on the brink of something more hopeful.
“We’re standing on the edge of a cliff and now we have to jump,” Kaster says. “It’s a weird position to be in. We made this first album. It was pretty much DIY. We funded it ourselves. We wrote, rehearsed, performed, all while working full-time jobs. Now we’re leaping into the unknown. Seeing the wheels fall off and seeing the world on fire. Everything’s in free fall, so let’s jump.”
Attempted Martyr is out 13 March on Mute
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