‘I’m the motherfucker who took down the towers,” screams Prostitute’s Moe Kazra on All Hail, opening their nightmarish, theatrical debut album Attempted Martyr. Over crushing fusions of industrial punk with elements of Middle Eastern, African and east Asian music, the band explores the vilification of Arabs in a post-9/11 US by inhabiting vicious characterisations – ones levelled at their Arab-majority community in Dearborn, Michigan. “A lot of Arabs in the area are coming to us and being like ‘that was very potent’, or ‘that was beautiful’. I didn’t really expect that,” says Kazra, who is Lebanese American. “The music is evil.”
The album’s lyric sheet, written by Kazra and drummer Andrew Kaster who join me on a call, is a flurry of violent fantasies, paranoid ramblings and literary references ranging from The Arabian Nights to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Written when they formed in 2020 but only self-released in late 2024, it became a sleeper hit with punk fans. Now signed to Mute, which will reissue the record this week, they are among the most exciting, unorthodox breakthroughs in recent American rock.
Dearborn is the US’s first Arab-majority city and home to its biggest mosque, making it a target for Islamophobic and xenophobic sensationalism. Growing up, Kaster says, “you’d hear shit like ‘they have sharia law there, they stone people in the streets’, and I’m like, what the fuck are you talking about?” With the lineup completed by guitarists Ross Babinski and Bret Wall, and bassist Dylan Zaranski, all members grew up in this misunderstood city – declared “America’s jihad capital” by the Wall Street Journal. “It’s just a really peaceful, diverse place,” Kaster says. “You see kids running around, and families on porches.”
The 9/11 attacks rocked local race relations when the band were at elementary school. “Most of my friends were Arab, most of my classmates were Arab,” Kaster says. “Post 9/11, going through the Dearborn school system, there was always a bit of separation there. There are the Arab kids, here are the white kids. We’d play separately from each other.” The day after the attacks, he recalls Arab classmates speaking as if they had to defend themselves from being blamed for what happened. “Looking back, it’s crazy that a kid in elementary school has to be worried about that.”
Kazra experienced those fears first-hand. “My family was threatened multiple times. Being an Arab from Dearborn, I kind of rejected that growing up – my race,” he says. “It wasn’t until my 20s when I became tired of hiding, rejecting my culture and people I know. At that point it was like: I deserve reparations!” he says, breaking into a grin. “I want a $3m mansion for what I’ve gone through. I want some damn money, America. You owe me!”
These experiences influenced Attempted Martyr’s provocative lashing out at bigotry, in music Kazra describes as “taking inspiration from Islam and Arab culture and making it as extreme as possible”; Kaster has previously spoken of taking stereotypes of Muslims that have proliferated in the US “and embracing them, amplifying them into grotesque caricature, throwing them back in people’s faces”. Sometimes, Prostitute inhabit fictionalised versions of real-world figures on All Hail, including Hamaas Abdul Khaalis (who led the 1977 Hanafi siege in Washington) and the 9/11 perpetrators – a decision that Kazra highlights as being influenced by “feeling ostracised in America as an Arab growing up”.
Despite ultimately de-glamorising violence, with Kaster noting that each song “ends in some kind of failure,” it is everywhere on this album. “Crazy, over-the-top characters are in abundance in literature, but not so much in music,” Kazra says. Kaster suggests that other vocalists may worry about being taken at face value, or alienating fans who are looking for an artist to relate to: “It’s hard to have a parasocial relationship with a homicidal terrorist.”
But it’s not all serious satirical commentary. Over screaming descending synths, the track Joumana Kayrouz pays bizarre tribute to a Lebanese personal injury lawyer regularly seen on Michigan’s billboards. “She’s got this almost dystopian, domineering presence,” Kaster says of her ads, describing the speaker as “this dog lusting after this all-powerful goddess – who’s also a lawyer”.
Attempted Martyr’s sound is as brutal and disorientating as the lyrics. Inspired by horror soundtracks, Kazra wanted to create “mystery and confusion as to what’s going on musically” through hard-to-place samples: Japanese noise-rockers Ground Zero and Malian takamba group Tallawit Timbouctou, twisted into galloping industrial noise and headbanging grooves.
Not everyone is a fan of such extremity. “None of my family messes with this music, to them it’s stupid as hell and offensive,” Kazra laughs. However, with an international tour and second album planned, Prostitute are finding fans elsewhere. “If we are giving a voice or at least an emotion to the frustrations people are feeling,” Kaster says, “that’s amazing.”