Prostitute

“The Detroit rock scene is all MC5 and White Stripes worship, and we don’t fit in with that whatsoever,” says Moe, vocalist and one half of the founding duo behind Dearborn, Michigan noise-rockers Prostitute. The group’s debut album, Attempted Martyr, is a full-spectrum blast of acerbic noise, sampler shrapnel, savagely mordant humour and bruised melancholy located light-years away from rock’n’roll revivalism.

Its complexity and simmered rage stomp hard on third rails, conjuring a fever dream of hope, desperation and alienation, a riot of artful profanity, disturbing imagery and blacker-than-midnight wit. An album for these perilous, cursed times, even if it wasn’t conceived as such, Attempted Martyr isn’t noise for its own sake, it’s for everyone’s: a catharsis, a venting, a return of fire.

A self-defence.“I had an identity crisis, growing up,” says Moe, “9/11 started a lot of xenophobia and Arab hatred and all that kind of shit. I hated being Arabic.

I hated Arabs in general, just because people were hating me. Through much of my 20s I felt like, ‘How about I be the character you want me to be?’ Andrew took that, ran with it, and made the philosophy behind it, this ‘radical terrorism’, this crazed zealot thing.”Andrew is the other half of Prostitute’s founding duo, drummer and co-writer of the group’s lyrics, co-conceiver of Attempted Martyr’s thematic throughline.

They’d known each other for years before making music together. “Moe was always pressing me to start a band,” says Andrew. “Then, in late 2019, he sat me and our friend Dylan down and said, ‘Listen, we’re all working jobs we hate or are going to school. When are we going to this band thing?

If not now, when? It’s never going to happen.’ Then COVID hit and we had all the time in the world.

We hunkered down in my mom’s basement, the three of us, and hammered out most of the album.”