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.”
