Immediately due west of Detroit sits the USA’s first Arab-majority city. Dearborn, Michigan is home to over 100,000 residents, a University of Michigan campus, and the continent’s largest mosque. Its wide roads are lined with strip malls and gas stations; the spectre of a desiccated auto industry looms large above the whole region. It’s in this environment that vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Moe Kazra and drummer Andrew Kaster became fast friends in their youth, evolving into a brotherhood while working the same job and forming their band, Prostitute. This past fall, Prostitute dropped their dizzying debut album, Attempted Martyr, after furiously debating every line, every drum hit, every riff. Their passionate attention to every last detail paid off: Attempted Martyr has broken containment, with audiences worldwide taking in their theatrical noise rock with flashes of Arab, West African, and East Asian influences.

Attempted Martyr is a loose concept album, with Kazra inhabiting a character of his own creation: a religious zealot whose fiery proselytizing is mostly frightening but a little charismatic. Ultimately, that Arab prince figure he draws from is a false idol, one doomed to succumb to both the turmoil he rails against and that which he whips up. The character is part of Kazra’s own process for dealing with his complicated emotions. “Growing up Arab in Dearborn wasn’t the easiest thing. No matter where we go, we’re perceived as terrorists. Same with the movies and video games like Call Of Duty. My identity was fucked up; I didn’t know who I was supposed to be. Being angry and 25, I was like, ‘Fuck you, you hate me so much; I’ll make you hate me in every way possible.'” With Prostitute, he’s taking control of that feedback loop: if you think he’s a terrorist, he’ll terrorize you from the stage. “It’s a theatricalization of terrorism,” adds Kaster.

High-concept noise rock wasn’t always the preferred expression of Kazra and Kaster. Kaster’s father played the punk bar circuit as a drummer, and Kaster followed in his footsteps, picking up his first pair of drumsticks in elementary school and keeping steady with it until adulthood. Kazra later had to hound him into picking them up again. Kazra was a sort of passive music enthusiast until he encountered Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, after which he became obsessed with making his own electronic ambient. He also had a longstanding curiosity about horror game and movie soundtracks and worked that into his electronic practice. “I showed Andrew some stuff I was working on in Ableton and he was like, ‘This shit sucks, listen to this instead'” Kazra recalls.

What Kaster showed him turned out to be even more formative. He opened Kazra’s eyes to the broader world of alternative rock, beyond the rock he came across as a young man plugged into the broader popular culture. All at once, Kazra fell in love with the work of Talking Heads, Steve Albini, and the Stooges. He still contends that Fun House is the greatest album of all time. It didn’t take long for Kazra to compile a massive list of influences from the noise rock world who can be heard in the interstices of Attempted Martyr: a little Black Midi here, a little Swans here, some Death Grips there. Explosive, confrontational music is what gets Kazra, and the rest of Prostitute, excited.

You can hear the lineage of boundary-pushing noise rock bands throughout Attempted Martyr. Kazra’s vocal delivery on “Senegal” would sound right at home on Holding Hands With Jamie; on other tracks, you can hear the at-times playful, at-times terrifying vocal stylings of Elias Rønnenfelt. On his vocals, Kazra says, “I don’t know what I was going for. To me, it comes off like the Fall. A lot of people are pointing to Iceage, and they’re not wrong. When I was starting off, I really loved Elias’ vocals.” As he leans more into his zealot-with-a-God-complex character, his singing becomes even more distinctive. On “Joumana Kayrouz,” an ode to one of southeastern Michigan’s most prominent personal injury lawyers, Kazra sounds as if he’s constantly switching between a grimace and a smile, like a man aware of his own lunacy but also the freedom that comes with living in his own reality — one where he’s the star.

On Detroit stages, Kazra really is the star. Every member of Prostitute kicks it into high gear, but over their years performing cuts from Attempted Martyr following lockdown, they’ve really amped up the live show. They were slightly concerned that the content might not go over well: “We played ‘All Hail’ at this bar called the Old Miami that’s a veterans’ bar and there’s this line in the song about me taking down the Twin Towers,” Kazra recalls. The high-pitched horn clip at the beginning is similarly bold. Sure, people are liable to get a little freaked out by Kazra’s aggressive theatricality, but the scene has embraced Prostitute. “Last time we played at this club in Detroit, people were singing along to the songs,” says Kazra. They’ve brought their live show to benefit concerts raising funds to help victims of ongoing wars in Palestine, Lebanon, and Sudan, events where the city’s DIY community has taken a stance alongside the oppressed.

“All Hail” is the song on Attempted Martyr that leans into an Arab sound and an aggressive rock sound the most. It opens with a sample from Ground Zero’s Consume Red, pitch-shifted ever so slightly with some due reverb that make it sound like a Hollywood action movie transitioning to a Middle East setting. The lyrics are the ramblings of someone convinced of their own invincibility, tempered by the belief that, should he die, he’s promised immortality beyond the world of the flesh. Kazra is quick to defend the music video that accompanies the track, which heavily utilizes generative AI. To critics, he responds: “What I don’t want people to forget is that the AI video was produced by a program that allowed you to generate videos of Arabs being killed.” The fact that AI tools picked up existing images of violence against Arabs and allows everyday users to make such images is the subject that he suggests should be addressed first.

For Kazra, calling attention to ongoing wars against Arabs in the Middle East is very personal. His family is from Lebanon; many of his friends, neighbors, and family members have lost homes and even their lives. Israel’s all-out war on Gaza that expanded into Lebanon has brought out a lot of audience members who are eternally frustrated by the US’s unquestioned backing of Israel’s military operations. People see the linkage between this unconditional support and the “forever wars” that made up the War on Terror, which may have ended on paper, but hasn’t really ended. “We wrote the lyrics prior to the current wars happening…but they put it all into perspective. The hatred of us is up front and I can really see it now,” Kazra explains. The long-term impact of Western destabilization of the Middle East for its own evolving interests was just as much at the forefront of the band’s collective mind as any individual war. The Arab influence — musically and politically — is something the band plans to lean into even more.

The outpouring of support they’ve received in the wake of Attempted Martyr’s release comes as a genuine shock to Kazra and Kaster. “It’s surreal, but I believed in us for a reason,” Kaster mentions. Not only are new fans enjoying the music, they’re resonating with everything about the band: the anger, the worldview, the mess. They’re used to the quiet lives they’ve been living in southeastern Michigan, where seemingly nothing happens, working late nights at the same job and getting in daily fist-fights over petty disagreements — always in good fun, of course, but truly the stuff of young knuckleheads. Kaster was especially shocked to see that Anthony Fantano reviewed Attempted Martyr: “I’ve been a fan since he started, basically. I’ve been a huge fan. I knew that Fantano would love this if he heard it.”

The band has reveled in the praise heaped upon the album, which was especially hard won. The members recall fighting over every lyric, every chord, and every drumbeat throughout the whole album. The first word that comes to mind is “painful.” “We had so many moments where we were going to fucking kill each other,” Kazra adds. For Prostitute, it was all in pursuit of an album that was free of anything derivative. Coming from Michigan, there are entirely too many bands who are downstream from MC5. There’s value in working within a tradition laid out by a band like MC5 or the band behind Kazra’s favorite album, the Stooges, but Prostitute are all about putting something new forward.

That doesn’t mean that Kazra and Kaster consider their debut album to be truly perfect. “There’s derivative stuff on Attempted Martyr that won’t be on the next one, but I’m proud that it’s unique in a few ways,” Kazra states. Prostitute are well on their way to their next album, and Kazra has a few promises: “This new album is Arab out the ass. It’ll make people dance, too.” They’re drawing from Black Midi as well as Kazra’s favorite legends from Brazil and Lebanon. The global component to Prostitute’s take on noise rock is what makes them stand out, and their collective curiosity for music outside the narrow rock canon is what keeps them motivated.

“When I heard ‘Slow’ by Black Midi for the first time, I wanted to quit music. They did what I was trying to do for so long,” Kazra says. As boundary-pushing as Black Midi were (RIP), Prostitute is going somewhere that no one in the Windmill Scene would dare go. Attempted Martyr is a terroristic noise rock opera, complete with groovy riffs, pummeling drums, and a frontman more crazed than anyone in their orbit. They settled on the title Attempted Martyr because they thought it was a funny play on words, but they see now that this figure, the “attempted martyr,” is a familiar face, one of someone trying desperately to surrender themselves to a higher cause but finding themselves thwarted from all angles. The grave injustices they see on the news, and the ramifications it has on their neighbors, ought to inspire someone to radical action. Prostitute’s art is made from that place of thwarted-ness, one that resonates with similarly horrified audiences. They won’t let you forget it.

Kazra concludes: “We’ll have manifestos out shortly with a list of demands.”

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Attempted Martyr is out now. Prostitute will play two shows at NYC’s New Colossus Festival on 3/8.