Prostitute's war on complacency is also a fight for survival

Out of that tense environment sprang a whole generation reckoning with xenophobia, displacement, and bigoted aggression – including Moe Kazra, co-founder and vocalist of Prostitute, who immortalised his frustration in a single couplet from the song “All Hail” that opens the band’s debut album, Attempted Martyr. “I’m the motherfucker / Who took down your tower,” he rages, drawing from every ounce of resentment he held at the time as a young Arab-American man of Lebanese descent. “I wanted to shock people," he states blankly, for the record. “I wanted to say the most offensive thing I could get away with.”

With the help of drummer Andrew Kaster, what might have ended up as just an inflammatory throwaway from Kazra instead became part of a more fleshed-out idea – still combative and in retaliation, but less overtly personal. Adding his take on the inception of Prostitute as the band’s other co-founding member, Kaster explains how he nudged Kazra into taking a more conceptual approach. "I was like, ‘Okay, maybe this isn't coming from you, Moe. Maybe you can take this caricature of a terrorist or a religious zealot, and you can push it and amplify it into something that's shitpost-y and ridiculous, but also has this obvious political, social depth to it," he says. "And from there, the rest fell into place.”

A year on from the release of Attempted Martyr, the band assemble around a large, dirty table at the Windmill venue in Brixton, where they are playing two sold-out nights as part of their first ever UK tour. Though it isn’t public knowledge at the time of our conversation, Prostitute have signed to UK label Mute, riding off the back of critical acclaim from the likes of Pitchfork and The Needle Drop. Spread out along an L-shaped sofa, the five men – guitarists Ross Babinski and Bret Wall, and bassist Dylan Zaranski are here too – don’t immediately stand out as makers of antagonistic barrages of pummelling noise, but as we get into it, their motivations start to speak for themselves.

Kazra was just six years old when the Twin Towers were brought down, allowing rampant xenophobia and racism to rise. Needless to say, being of Arab descent put a metaphorical target on his back and had a profound effect on his formative years, confounding his identity. “Growing up, I hated being Arab. I didn't want anything to do with it,” he says with a shrug. “My mom said ‘You're a white boy. You're not Arab. You're not gonna learn Arabic. You're gonna assimilate here,’ so that's what I did.”

But growing up, along with the rest of the band, in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn – which has a predominantly Muslim population – the day-to-day community that surrounded them, compared to that of the rest of the fearmongered country and more nihilistically minded corners of the internet, became a mindfuck for Kazra.

It wasn't until he went to Lebanon in his 20s and had the opportunity to reconnect with his familial roots that the assimilation came undone. “Coming back, I hated everybody. I was buying into this idea of ‘You fucked me, I'm gonna fuck you now,’” he says, the anger in his words restrained by a calm, rational tone. It got to the point where almost anything could provoke him into bridling dissent, from the heaviness of existing within the structural racism of American society to simply being irked by the cuisine: “We'll be eating at a restaurant in America, and I'll be like, ‘This fucking sucks. It's disgusting,’” he laughs. “Part of it is I want the food to be better, but part of it is like, fuck America. Fuck Americans. It's hard to get out of that mindset.”

As he gets older, Kazra says he’s realised more and more that a lot of those reactionary feelings come down to ego. “I'm still trying to navigate a huge identity crisis I had at 6 years old, not being able to fit in anywhere and hating myself,” he explains. “It's difficult now, being in your 30s, and still feeling stuck. Prostitute is a way of trying to get out of that situation, and it's not necessarily cathartic. It's still struggling.” The rest of the band nod in agreement. “Whether or not we're directly affected by the zeitgeist of America currently, and within the past however many years, there's still sympathy and empathy that comes through for people that are demonised through that society,” Babinski adds.

With such focused, socially-conscious anger and a prickling backstory that charges this outlet of theirs, it’s fair to wonder exactly where Prostitute see themselves fitting in the grander musical landscape. While they do have peers in the likes of Detroit-based antagonisers The Armed, with whom they share management, and they have respect for the likes of Black MIDI, Model/Actriz, and Death Grips, beyond that it’s dangerous territory to tar them with a certain genre brush. “I like bands, I like music, but I hate post-punk,” Kazra states, though the Bandcamp tags for Attempted Martyr do put them in that box. “I don’t think anyone here is pushing us towards anything,” he says. “How do you make sense of this band?” he asks the room without waiting for an answer. “What I'm saying is, who else is writing war music? Who else is trying to go to war?”

War music is an apt phrase. Attempted Martyr is a collision of rhythms and riffs, horns and spat lyrics; songs designed more to bombard than persuade – oppressively transgressive from the get-go, in both intention and style. From the opening Allah-praising, Arabic-language blitz onwards, each track writhes with its own arsenal of aggro and swagger.

Of course, the field of angry young men in heavy music is a pretty crowded one, but Prostitute shore up their position by pulling global sounds into their sonic onslaught. “I don't know why bands from America aren’t paying attention to what's going on in West Africa, paying attention to what's going on in Asia,” says Kazra, warming to the topic. “There are all these crazy, weird sounds that are happening, and people messing with that and turning it on its head, so why do all these post-punk bands just work on guitar riffs?” “Guitar isn't shocking anymore,” Kaster adds. “You could take a nap to distorted guitars at this point.” “Especially in Detroit,” Babinski interjects. “It’s a bunch of garage-rock bands that all sound the same, shitty way.”

Attempted Martyr is decidedly an act of rebellion, but it's one that's from a previous iteration of the group and a lot has changed since. “It was written four or five years ago, so I’ve personally disconnected from it,” Kazra admits. But even just making the band and their debut a reality was in itself a war. “Not to sound dramatic, but at least for me putting the band together was a little traumatic,” says Kaster. “Mostly it wasn't friendly,” Kazra agrees. “There was a lot of hatred, a lot of bullying, a lot of one-upmanship, a lot of ‘I'm gonna fucking kill you today.’”

The band actually broke up, temporarily, less than a year ago, Kazra reveals, and it seems the agonisingly slow burn of their eventual success was partly to blame. When the reaction from the world takes a while to grow, and you’ve unearthed such intense and personal feelings, sometimes you just have to walk away. And yet here they are, back in the ring for another round.

“We've gotten in so many fucking fights regarding the album that there wasn't much time to be able to appreciate what has happened,” Kazra says. The band attribute their desperately wanting to be successful to being in their mid- to late-20s at the time, with no real direction post-college. “If we're gonna take a chance on this band, it has to be done as well as it can be,” Kaster explains. “I don't want to look back with any regrets. But, seeing it work out, the pressure of thinking ‘What the fuck are we doing? Is this just gonna end up somewhere in the void online?’ has lessened a bit.”

Naturally, the internal frictions within the band spilled over to Attempted Martyr’s fiery lyrics and the onerous process through which they were written, “We murdered each other over these lyrics,” says Kazra. “Every single line was a fight that would last for weeks.” “It's our process,” Kaster adds. “He writes his own set of lyrics. I write my own set of lyrics. And, of course, we want to defend every single line.”

Working out how Prostitute were going to sound was also a big part of the process. Given that Attempted Martyr began with Kazra and Kaster fleshing out the overarching concept and idea, the ambition coming out of the gate was immense, especially as Kazra, Kaster, and Zaranski were coming to band life pretty green. It wasn’t until Babinski and Wall came on board, both with experience in previous bands – including a funk outfit – that the actual musicality of the songs came to life through a process of attaching the meat of the songs to their skeletons during rehearsals.

It's true – for better or worse – that bands that function like Prostitute often have a short shelf-life, quickly swallowed up by fractious emotions. But the band are clear that they want to be in the game for a long time, not just a short, sharp burst. When Chris Koltay, the engineer on Attempted Martyr, commented that the tension between the five men was a part of what made them sound so great, it gave the band pause for thought. “It was like, ‘Okay, well, do we want to make the best music possible or hate our lives?’” says Kazra. “I was fucking crazy back when I was 25, I was losing it every day. Now that I'm 30, I'm trying to keep things healthy. Everybody's trying to make it healthier. But it is hard.”

Moving forward, the band have already started work on their next chapter of the Prostitute story. “It’s definitely more melodic, more hitting,” Kazra reveals, “but it will still have a lot of craziness going on.” Much like their debut, the notion of their next one is rooted in Kazra’s militant eye upon overwhelming with sound, like a cluster grenade of sonics. It all comes back to the same idea of war music, he says. “That’s what made Attempted Martyr so cool. It sounds like a war, but it’s mystical at the same time. We have the same intention with the second album, but with more melody,” he adds, and Kaster agrees.

Given that the two of them are the nucleus of Prostitute, how they agree on the future seems to be a key ingredient to keeping the group on a steady footing. “It's a common trope, right? What do you do for the follow up? Do you double-down or do you go sideways?” Kaster says. They may have a few new twists to reckon with down the line, but as they make their way back into the world with their debut album ready to go again, Prostitute’s commitment remains as it ever was: all or nothing at all.