“The Detroit rock scene is all MC5 and White Stripes worship, and we don’t fit in with that whatsoever,” says Moe, vocalist and one half of the founding duo behind Dearborn, Michigan noise-rockers Prostitute. The group’s debut album, Attempted Martyr, is a full-spectrum blast of acerbic noise, sampler shrapnel, savagely mordant humour and bruised melancholy located light-years away from rock’n’roll revivalism. Its complexity and simmered rage stomp hard on third rails, conjuring a fever dream of hope, desperation and alienation, a riot of artful profanity, disturbing imagery and blacker-than-midnight wit. An album for these perilous, cursed times, even if it wasn’t conceived as such, Attempted Martyr isn’t noise for its own sake, it’s for everyone’s: a catharsis, a venting, a return of fire. A self-defence.

“I had an identity crisis, growing up,” says Moe, “9/11 started a lot of xenophobia and Arab hatred and all that kind of shit. I hated being Arabic. I hated Arabs in general, just because people were hating me. Through much of my 20s I felt like, ‘How about I be the character you want me to be?’ Andrew took that, ran with it, and made the philosophy behind it, this ‘radical terrorism’, this crazed zealot thing.”

Andrew is the other half of Prostitute’s founding duo, drummer and co-writer of the group’s lyrics, co-conceiver of Attempted Martyr’s thematic throughline. They’d known each other for years before making music together. “Moe was always pressing me to start a band,” says Andrew. “Then, in late 2019, he sat me and our friend Dylan down and said, ‘Listen, we’re all working jobs we hate or are going to school. When are we going to this band thing? If not now, when? It’s never going to happen.’ Then COVID hit and we had all the time in the world. We hunkered down in my mom’s basement, the three of us, and hammered out most of the album.”

“The embryonic version of the band was pretty bad, to be honest,” he continues, “just standard noise-rock/post-punk. Then one day Moe came to the basement with 10 or 15 tracks that were just an arrangement or a sample looped over and over. He played them to me: ‘Pick a few you want to work on’.” Prostitute took decisive shape, drawing on their shared love for literature, for horror, for extreme music, for beauty, for noise. They drew the Arabic elements of their sound further to the surface as the group’s line-up was fleshed out. 

Looking for a way to incorporate more guitar without falling into hackneyed rock tropes, they welcomed aboard Ross, who’d been playing guitar in a jazz/funk group in Hamtramck, a Detroit enclave with the US’s only Muslim majority population. Ross and his bandmate Bret stepped aboard, and quickly became key members of Prostitute. “It’s all a bit serendipitous,” says Andrew. Each of the members were raised in Dearborn, went to the same schools, orbited the same groups of people and crossed paths before eventually meeting each other and coming together as a band. 

Once they located the concept for the album, Prostitute’s identity fell quickly into place. “We’re taking this maligned character, these stereotypes, and embracing them, amplifying them into grotesque caricature, throwing them back in people’s faces,” says Andrew. “We’re both big fans of Kendrick Lamar and how, on To Pimp A Butterfly, he’s playing all these different characters, embracing all these ugly aspects, not just to be edgy – he’s amplifying it, to make people confront it.”

Making Attempted Martyr was an intense experience, arduous. “Have you seen the movie The Lighthouse?” asks Andrew. “Two guys trapped together, for months. Stockholm syndrome. Gaslighting. Making the album was like that. Every little element was scrutinised and argued over. It got physical, three times. But we wanted to come out of the gate with something great. We didn’t want to half-ass it.” 

The album drew inspiration from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, from the “almost deity-like figure” of personal injury lawyer and self-publicist Joumana Kayrouz and the bizarre tale of Hamaas Abdul Khaalis’s failed 1977 siege in Washington DC, to spin episodes in the life of its titular attempted martyr, a damaged character who, Moe says, “has no regard for human life, who doesn’t discriminate as to who he wants killed”. There’s nothing simple about what’s going on within these tracks; they beg your decoding, your interpretation, and Prostitute aren’t here to make anything explicit; they want to preserve the mystery. 

But even they’re spooked by the impact that’s followed its release, the audience it’s found who are dedicated to investigating the infinite nuances within their attack, the way its themes have swung to the fore of the culture in the years since they conceived it. “When we started the album, the war in Gaza hadn’t begun yet,” says Andrew. “But the world was still pretty fucked up. We were still living through Trump, through Covid. It already felt like the car was going off the cliff, and no-one’s at the wheel. There’s an angst to the album. I’m not religious, but I’ve always been drawn to art and stories about religion – this yearning for transcendence, for an answer, for forgiveness. The album is about someone trying to transcend in some way. This character is reprehensible. But we’re not trying to tell anyone what to think. This isn’t some manifesto – this is art, it’s an outlet for things we were feeling.”

The group are based in Dearborn, Michigan, which has America’s largest Muslim population, a fact the bigots at the Wall Street Journal celebrated in 2024 by describing the city as “America’s Jihad capital”. It’s these kinds of circumstance that birthed Attempted Martyr, but Prostitute win over their enemies by translating their rage into ugly beauty, into thorny art and uncompromising brilliance, revelling in the stupidity of their adversaries and triumphing with every decibel of noise. 

“I wanted to use that Wall Street Journal headline on a piece of merch,” grins Andrew. “Take that idea and reappropriate it. Feels dicey to do that right now, but maybe we will. We are not so pretentious as to pretend like we speak on behalf of anyone’s suffering, nor are we interested in proselytising our politics. It’s just music, and the problems the world faces today won’t be fixed with more entertainment, more content. If our fans deem us as having anything important to say, that’s on them, certainly not by our design.”

For now, the group are working on Attempted Martyr’s follow-up, which Moe says will draw deeper from their Arabic influences, will be more collaborative, and will give more space for all their elements to bleed freely into the music. “We have this sound that is terrifying,” he says. “I borrow a lot from world music, mixing it with guitars, trying to make guitar music interesting again.”

“We’re naturally drawn to things that are abrasive and beautiful at the same time,” adds Andrew. At that intersection, Prostitute have made some of the most thrilling and essential noise of their generation. And the best, it seems, is still to come. 

Attempted Martyr is out on CD, a special limited Arabic edition on Lebanese sunburst vinyl exclusively through Dinked, and a red vinyl edition,
on 13 March 2026 via Mute.