Walking through the artist’s compound of Chicago’s Riot Fest early on a cloudy Saturday afternoon, dozens of artists, music industry professionals, and other VIPs are leaving their backstage trailers to head over to the main stage, hoping to stake out a good spot to watch the next noteworthy band on the bill.
It’s the kind of movement you’d expect from a hometown hero’s set later in the afternoon or for one of the bigger headliners in the evening, but not for the second act of the day on the massive Riot Stage. But it’s also not unexpected, considering how how much buzz the band Militarie Gun received on the festival grounds before they came on stage.
Since Ian Shelton founded Militarie Gun in 2020, they’ve quickly become a favorite of punk and hardcore bands (and fans) young and old. In the last year alone, the Los Angeles band has been asked to play with punk legends like Gorilla Biscuits, Sex Pistols (although that show was canceled due to injury) and Alkaline Trio along with contemporary headliners like Knocked Loose, Mannequin Pussy, Touche Amore and High Vis.
“We were on tour with Manchester Orchestra and then Knocked Loose, and we also opened for Limp Bizkit, so it’s all in our lexicon,” Shelton says, seated in the back corner of mid-Wilshire’s Met Him at a Bar. “When we toured with Manchester Orchestra, we opened the show with the soft version of ‘Never F—d Up Once’ to invite people in. We view ourselves as chameleons, because we want to be ourselves, but we want to play to the audience. We can play any version of these songs and it’s still us. The best version of us is when we’re inspired by the band we’re playing with — not even necessarily before that show, but watching their show and being like ‘We need to get better.’ That’s my favorite thing on Earth.”
That ability to change gears while staying uniquely true to themselves has remained part of Militarie Gun‘s appeal as they’ve grown from local darlings to an international powerhouse. Often mislabeled as a simple hardcore band from their early “All Roads Lead to the Gun” EPs and 2023’s “Life Under the Gun” debut album, Shelton’s relatably catchy songwriting has drawn in other musicians, fans and critics alike. Despite his insistence (between bites of garlic shrimp and rigatoni vodka) that his lyrics all stem from his naivety about life, there’s an intelligence and authenticity on Militarie Gun’s first two albums and handful of EPs that many bands spend decades trying to nail down.
Combine that top-shelf writing and musical versatility with a band that’s growing more and more comfortable in its own skin and you end up with Militarie Gun’s new album, “God Save the Gun.” But for those expecting more of the same on the band’s sophomore effort, they may be surprised with the set of indie-punk singalongs that flood their latest release. And as a group that never really considered itself “hardcore,” it’s both an opportunity for creative growth and a chance to spread their wings into the music they’ve always wanted to make.
“We always wanted to make a song that sounded like Third Eye Blind, but I couldn’t sing that well,” Shelton says, cutting at the disc of burrata atop his pasta. “I’m just a dumba— writing songs that are aspiring to be catchy, and we arrive at the most simple thing.”
When the band started, it was as inspired by Modest Mouse as it was iconic Chicago hardcore label Touch and Go Records, the singer said. The Born Against song “Alive With Pleasure” was also part of the prototype for their sound with noisy guitars and somewhat melodic, shouted vocals. But more than anything, the band was fixated on unlocking the next sound that excited them. Inevitably, Shelton says the band are going to end up making music that nobody enjoys, because they’ll have burnt out all of our receptors to the things that people like about us. “I used to say Militarie Gun was a hardcore band just to piss people off,” he said. “I wanted people to be mad that we were referring to ourselves as something we clearly were not, but then Turnstile happened and we were suddenly part of a scene.”
According to Shelton, much of Militarie Gun can actually be attributed to the world going the opposite way of how he expects. What started as a pandemic-induced solo project while on a break from his Seattle-area powerviolence band Regional Justice Center was never really supposed to leave his bedroom, and the vocalist’s move from Washington to Los Angeles was to help him get away from the his musical past. After their rise as an accidental hardcore band, it would’ve been predictable and likely easier to commit to the bit and lean into the scene forming around them. Instead, Shelton stripped away the tactical vest he used to wear on stage, learned to “actually sing” while recovering from a vocal injury, and released an acoustic EP along with some poppier single to soft-launch their new sound.
Even on “God Save the Gun,” Shelton and his bandmates — guitarists William Acuña and Kevin Kiley, bassist Waylon Trim and drummer David Stalsworth — couldn’t refrain from putting together a big, cinematic album that was more than just a collection of songs. While the singer originally believed he was writing lyrics for the album from the perspective of “embracing desperation as a character,” he soon realized it was all just a mask to shield his own perspective on the world and prevent himself from becoming too sincere in his songwriting. “No song can ever be about someone else without also being about me,” Shelton explains. “God Save the Gun” became a 14-song rollercoaster with a defined narrative through Shelton’s innermost thoughts.
The record starts with the line “I’ve been slipping up” and ends with “If you want to keep your life, you’ve got to let it go.” There’s a clear arc between those two things as the record moves through its acts, Shelton says.
“The first three songs are about seeking fulfillment from places that you shouldn’t, and then it turns inward. ‘God Owes Me Money’ is about childhood trauma and how people do harm from not thinking rather than pre-calculation — which also means I’ve traumatized people by not thinking,” the singer said.
From there, “God Save the Gun” goes to this self-reflection of trauma and emerging with learning the wrong lesson of — “I had bad done to me, so it’s OK for me to be bad and an alcoholic because I’ve seen all this stuff,” Shelton said. “That’s the manic episode in the middle of the record, and then it takes a downward slope where it’s the depression and suicidal thoughts as a result of the embrace of destruction. Then ‘Isaac’s Song’ comes on to pick you up and dust you off, and the end is meant to be hopeful.”
While the clear arc of “God Save the Gun” may be a new endeavor for Militarie Gun, the larger theme carries on what they started with “Life Under the Gun” and their early EPs. For Shelton, the band’s songs have always been about contextualizing his own blunders, acknowledging external issues and working through both of them together to hopefully build toward a brighter personal (and potentially societal) future. That combination of the songwriter’s internal struggles within larger society is one of the core tenets for Shelton and Militarie Gun — particularly when it comes to making mistakes and seeking forgiveness and improvement in a world that’s all too eager to “cancel” people for prior transgressions.
“The worst thing now culturally is that people have to pretend that they’re perfect,” Shelton says. “People are throwing others in front of the cancel culture bus to slow it down, just so it can’t run them over. I’d rather stand in front of the bus like ‘Can it run me over? Do I withstand the test?’ instead of having to pretend I’ve never done anything bad. It feels better to admit you’ve done wrong than to say you never have, because then you’re living in secret, which is the scariest thing to me.”
Militaire Gun performs at 7 p.m. Thursday at Oblivion in Los Angeles (“God Save the Gun” record release show).
This story originally appeared on LA Times
