“We’re just here in Barcelona, just panic everywhere, fear everywhere. It’s like… um… the… well, the movie. That killer, or something like that, so everybody’s afraid here and everything is closed. Well, just call me whenever you have time.”
These words are presented as an unadorned voice memo in the outro of Prostitute’s ‘Judge’, and I find it hard not to think of the devastation on the streets I intimately know. Sights like this one have permeated my home of Minneapolis, where our immigrant populace faces the threat of kidnapping, deportation, illegal confinement, and utter deprivation of human rights, just for going about their lives. A once-bustling mercado locks its doors as a security measure; inside, most of the 35 businesses are closed. The Palestinian grocer in town closes the streetside entrance entirely. For days on end, I see videos of abductions on street corners mere minutes from my home. It is difficult to go long without seeing signs that mark where neighbours have been kidnapped. There are killers – and scores more aspiring killers in wait – roaming the streets, day in, day out.
In Chicago, I share notes with a friend on our respective cities’ responses to ICE occupations; for both of us, helicopters overhead have become commonplace. A stop in Madison becomes an impromptu exchange of knowledge on community organisation – the moment someone learns I am from Minneapolis, where 3,000 masked and armed agents killed two citizens, arrested hundreds, and incurred over $200 million in economic damage and lost wages in the span of two months – they confide that they are bracing for a similar swarm of activity in their city.
I find myself thinking, too, of Dearborn, Michigan, a city significantly populated by Arab Americans. Dearborn has been the target of undue scrutiny since the turn of the millennium, stoked by racist fearmongering in the aftermath of 9/11. Just as Minneapolis had been targeted for its large numbers of Somali citizens, Dearborn has seen an increase in the same terror campaigns.
Prostitute’s debut, Attempted Martyr, was first self-released shortly before the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024. To say that it has taken on a stark new relevance in the time since is an understatement. Attempted Martyr already sounded like a furious release of global pressures interlocking across decades, centuries, millennia, spat in breathless fervour; now, re-released by Mute a year and a half later, it feels as if it’s absorbed all that the world has thrown in the interim and redirected it back even louder.
To recap the story of Prostitute so far: the band is a Dearborn quintet with members of Lebanese, Roma, Maltese, and Polish descent. The lyricists are vocalist/guitarist Moe Kazra and drummer Andrew Kaster, who toiled on every detail of Attempted Martyr for four years. The album emerges as only music borne out of urgency, anger, heartbreak, and desperation can. Its lyrics are rapidly unraveling, vitriolic monologues from the perspective of a deluded Arabian prince, who sees himself as a messianic figure, but carries an all-consuming bloodlust and greed. The band name: “a verb,” a commentary on the act of offering oneself up for consumption, monetarily or spiritually or corporeally.
No one in Prostitute could have expected the chain reaction: prominent reviews, co-signs, and tours in the months that followed. Now, their signing via Mute thrusts their debut back into the spotlight. But Attempted Martyr is a strange beast – the year and a half of hindsight may as well be a sharpening of the image that was already there.
In another band’s hands, the conceptualism would be overly heady and distracting. In Prostitute’s, there’s nary a moment where the raw embodiment of that expression isn’t viscerally felt. The feeling sinks in quite early, hearing the group warping the reedy hojok sample of Ground Zero’s ‘Consume Red’ into an apocalyptic clarion call, an otherworldly descent into manic violence as Kazra’s zealous barks keep growing more feverish.
On first listen, I felt this sheer ferocity in my gut before anything else. This feels, to me, one of the most potent elements of Attempted Martyr: it implores you to feel something in its provocations. I’m hard-pressed to imagine anyone taking a serious listen to the record and not coming away with a charged response. (Yes, that includes hypothetical pearl-clutching conservatives.)
Prostitute don’t do anything in half-measures compositionally, frequently filling every corner of the mix in brutalising totality. A first brush with the towering ‘M. Dada’, for example, is designed to be almost too overwhelming to take in at once, a cavalcade of chugging guitar riffs and booming bass notes and whirring keyboard cacophonies that ebbs and flows until you’re left scattered and dazed. But isn’t that just what life feels like now?
It’s not all blustering sidewinders. though. On every listen, the moment that stops my breath is one of the record’s most uncharacteristic: the jarring half-time collapse midway through ‘Senegal’. The track is one of the more relentless charges, and yet, just when it seems least likely, it crests into a passage that sounds almost like soaring. The song’s speaker, for a rare moment on the album, shifts into a plea, almost as if bargaining. The heightened facade slips. The humanity seeps in.
What Kazra and Kaster conjure throughout their lyrics is a full-throated demand to be heard, and not diminished or misrepresented. It is an assertion on their own terms, one that carries with it the weight of generations of displacement and violence and discrimination. When Kazra’s agitator character yells out about being “the motherfucker who took down the towers” or threatening to “push the button and make history repeat,” it’s that palpable anger at injustice that lands first.
Grappling with Attempted Martyr in 2026, it’s difficult not to share in that anger. The band’s comments on making music in the shadow of “forever wars” just last year are even more urgent now, as the United States and Israel wage an all-out assault on Iran. Just as images of absolute destruction across Palestine and Lebanon have felt (and continue to feel) inescapable for years, much of my writing of this review was shaped by pervasive live documentation of Tehran’s schools leveled with children inside and city skylines on fire. If Prostitute’s brand of frustration and rage already felt immediate upon the record’s initial release, it now feels almost troublingly perennial in this particular era of wanton imperial slaughter.
The lyrics that could scan as a summary of ongoing terror are the ones that cut the deepest. The repeated commands to “open fire on a crowd” that swarm the frenzy of ‘M. Dada’ now brings to mind the sights of ICE firing toxic gas and permanently-disabling “less-lethal” rounds on masses in my own city that became routine at the start of the year.
But it all truly comes back to that haunting juxtaposition on ‘Judge’. The song proper parades around in an insular braggadocio of deified power, Prostitute’s prince character building a self-mythology in the calibre of Blood Meridian. It’s only when the last note fades that the voicenote epilogue emerges to underline the reality beneath those words, the devastation to civilian life that comes from these delusions of absolute control.
The panic persists. The fear persists. But Prostitute implores us to not lose sight of the people caught in the eye of the storm.
Prostitute’s Attempted Martyr receives its first worlwide release via Mute, and is out now
