The FADER’s longstanding GEN F series profiles the emerging artists you need to know right now.

Prostitute’s inaugural house show in 2021 was a success before the first song was over. The band opened with their song “All Hail,” the rampaging intro to their 2024 debut album Attempted Martyr. As soon as the room filled with samples of squealing horns, infernal gusts of guitar feedback, and vocalist Moe Kazra’s deranged howls about “the motherfucker who took down the towers,” a handful of bewildered attendees bolted. “[They] got the fuck out of that house,” Kazra remembers, snickering proudly.

As one would expect from a band called Prostitute, their music revels in disorder, confrontation, and the giddy desecration of the self-involved earnestness that permeates so much modern guitar music. Their debut, Attempted Martyr, was a loose concept album about a reprehensible zealot succumbing to all of humanity’s worst sins in their misguided pursuit of holy righteousness. Kazra, who's Arab-American, draws from personal experiences to write their lyrics that speak to very real horrors that affect the Arab world, but in a way that purposefully avoids the inherent virtuousness of so-called “protest music.”

“Let’s take this character and blow it up into this grotesque caricature of Arab-ness,” drummer Andrew Kaster says of the project’s nuanced narrative. “The kind of caricature that those who hate Arabs see them as. Let’s co-opt that and amplify it and throw it back in people’s faces.”

So far, Prostitute’s intent has been to send people running for the door, either physically or intellectually, in hopes of leading them down a new passageway of thinking. But now that their efforts have attracted a growing audience of supportive noiseniks who see their lyrics as a pertinent response to ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, Prostitute are at a crossroads. Do they continue to give their fans the catharsis they desire, or throw a curveball their way?

“I don’t like political art that is didactic and trying to proselytize its beliefs to you,” Kaster says. “I think it’s much more interesting if you plug your head into a real character; someone who is who they are, virtues and flaws combined.”

Prostitute were co-founded in 2020 in Dearborn, Michigan, by Kazra, a jazz-school dropout who was making horror-themed ambient music, and Kaster, an older friend of the vocalist who had initially given up his dreams of drumming in a band a decade earlier. The initial idea was to make one great album before the window closed on their youth and other life priorities took hold. After expanding into a quintet of musicians — with bassist Dylan Zaranski, guitarist Ross Babinski, and guitarist Bret Wall — they put all their effort into delivering that fully-formed product.

Attempted Martyr achieved that vision: sonically vicious, lyrically sophisticated, visually titillating — even though it was “complete hell” to put together. Inter-band fights were a constant, and both Kazra and Kastra each quit numerous times before ultimately returning to see the job through. “It was the worst thing we’ve all ever went through,” Kazra says.

Fortunately, their suffering wasn’t for nothing. Attempted Martyr picked up serious buzz after its release in October 2024, one year after the October 7 attacks in Israel. Its Arab-American lyrical perspective turned Prostitute into timely figureheads, despite the fact that they were writing about political and social conditions that have affected the Arab world for decades.

“For understandable reasons, I feel like everything we were doing and talking about just got associated exclusively with what’s going on in Israel and Palestine,” Kaster says. “It’s a mind-meltingly horrifying thing to witness. At the same time, we didn’t come out trying to represent that or be a voice for that. And so it’s kind of a mind fuck.”

Prostitute says they never set out to make Rage Against the Machine-type rallying cries, and they don’t intend to. They’re now wrestling with what the band means to them versus what it means to people who now expect something out of them.

“When I see the things that get attached to us,” Kaster says, “my inclination is to move sideways a bit. But at the same time, this isn’t the kind of music that’s about sitting in the corner and crying about your feelings. People are getting ripped out of their homes right now and executed in the middle of the fucking street. These are the things occupying all of our minds, so that’s still going to be in the music.”

Kaster points out that Kazra has family in Lebanon, and wonders if their music is even capable of making a difference. “Maybe it’s cool for them to see their relative, this Lebanese guy, speaking about Arab topics. But at the end of the day, what’s that doing for them? They're trying to survive.”

That includes the members of Prostitute. Although they're committed to boldly expressing themselves on their next record, they’re also figuring out how to balance their artistic integrity with the very “real concern” of government retaliation. As they’ve watched people on American soil get abducted and threatened with deportation simply for writing op-eds that are critical of Israel, Prostitute realized that there are genuine stakes to a band releasing music that’s even vaguely hostile toward Western hegemony in the Middle East.

“When we started the band we kind of joked, oh, we’re gonna get banned, we’re going to be on a no-fly list,” Kaster says. “Now it actually seems like it could happen. It is a practical concern for us.”

That doesn’t mean they haven’t been approaching it all with humor. Over our chaotic Zoom call in early February, the members playfully bully each other and deflect pointed questions with goofy non-sequiters, revealing distinct personalities: bassist Dylan Zaranski is the quiet one; Babinski the bubbly talker; Kazra, the trickster; and Kaster the well-spoken theorist. (Before I can suss Wall’s vibe, he leaves the call to head back to work.) All of Prostitute have day jobs and never had idealistic expectations of their corrosive noise-rock whisking them away into a career in music. “My mom hates this,” Kazra says with a laugh. “She told me to get a new job.”

Their goal is to make the most out of what comes next. Their next opus, they say, will be more live sounding and less reliant on backing tracks, with a more cohesive blend of sampling and real instruments. Babinski says he’s been writing on a guitar that's strung like a banjo and on an electric baglama that's connected to guitar pedals, all to channel a more traditional Middle Eastern sound. They want the music to be bold, forward-thinking, provocative — and the lyrics will follow suit.

“We want to take Attempted Martyr and say the things that we didn’t necessarily get the chance to say,” Kazra says of the to-be album. “Whether they’re more offensive, whether we’re going to be placed on a no-fly list, no matter what — the music needs to go there.”