Militarie Gun are doing it faster

Militarie Gun appear on the cover of the Winter 2023 Issue — head to the AP Shop to grab a copy.

Ian Shelton’s mind has always worked at 100 miles per hour, but lately it feels like the rest of the world has caught up with him. When a band have a year like the one Militarie Gun have just had, things get real busy, real fast. Even for someone who readily describes their desire to create as a compulsion — turning from project to project on a dime, with a new song always at his fingertips — the breakout season sparked by the release of the band’s debut album, Life Under the Gun, in the summer has been a lot to handle. “It’s really hard to have perspective on it at this point,” the vocalist admits. 

In the past few months alone, Militarie Gun have racked up thousands of miles opening for the similarly buzzy Bay Area hardcore band Scowl, released a collaborative seven-inch with Hattiesburg synth-punks MSPAINT, and been sucked into Post Malone’s orbit for a backstage rager at whatever enormodome he was playing that night. Anthony Green jumped onstage with them on a cruise ship operated by Coheed and Cambria. They even got shouted out online by Bob Mould, who kind of invented their pulse-quickening blend of indie-rock guitars, hardcore energy, and barked melodies with Hüsker Dü and Sugar, ahead of a show at 924 Gilman in Berkeley. “It’s all just happened in rapid succession,” Shelton says, with an air of understatement.

Read more: 15 best modern hardcore bands for day one fans

Pauses have been hard to come by, but as soon as we’re done talking, Shelton is going to drive out of Los Angeles and head for some small town on the coast with his girlfriend. When he’s there, he’ll try to function as a human being with time on their side while the looming shadow cast by Militarie Gun’s latest batch of European dates — five weeks across the mainland, U.K., and Ireland with Spiritual Cramp and Gumm — grows longer. “It’s a lot of cramming what feels like normality into a small space, which is inherently not normal,” he observes. “We’re basically pretending to relax for a handful of days.”

The other side of the story is that this punishing, chaotic timetable represents a plan coming together. Militarie Gun started kicking during the pandemic, with Shelton working alone in his rehearsal space to assemble the songs that made up their first seven-inch, My Life is Over, which was put out by Denver’s Convulse Records in the fall of 2020. Its melding of grinding noise-rock textures with ringing melodies that spoke to Shelton’s love of Guided By Voices came out of left field for listeners who primarily associated him with the gnarly powerviolence of Regional Justice Center, a project that is unremittingly intense and heavy. 

After bouncing some demos off friends and hearing their mix of surprise and excitement, Shelton knew he had something. That’s when he started moving through the gears. Militarie Gun went from a solo gig to a band — a semi-solid lineup currently features guitarists William Acuña and Nick Cogan, with Waylon Trim on bass and Vince Nguyen on drums — in time for their first tour late in 2021. By that point, they’d already released the two-part EP, All Roads Lead to the Gun, which would be reissued by their new label Loma Vista — home to heavyweights including Iggy Pop and St. Vincent — the following year. They’d later sign with Roc Nation, the management agency founded by Jay-Z, and have “Pressure Cooker,” their collaborative single with power-pop maestro Dazy, featured in a Taco Bell ad.

While all this was going on, the paint was drying on Life Under the Gun, a record that had been hanging in the background the whole time as touring became their day-to-day. With its cleaner lines ricocheting off undimmed aggro bounce — thanks partly to the stewardship of hardcore mage Taylor Young as producer — its songs pushed their shows toward becoming communal shoutalongs, and they were happy to hammer that home by playing almost nonstop. “Touring is disruptive, but it also fits in the rhythm of my life — waking up, getting in the van, and driving in the next city is a thing that makes sense to my brain,” Shelton says. “I can pretty much do that on an infinite loop. We just did seven weeks, and most of us were like, ‘I mean, I could go for more.’ We’re resigned to the life.”

All of that is a roundabout way of saying that if any group on Earth could handle the brain-scrambling pace of Militarie Gun’s 2023, it’s Militarie Gun. All this plate-spinning works for Shelton, in particular, because plate-spinning is his normal state of being. “We have the month of January to pretty much do nothing,” he says, but “do nothing” does not mean what you think it means. “I’m hoping to get through a lot of demos and ideas that I have in my Voice Memos,” he adds. “That’s when I feel the most normal, when I can get in the rhythm of knocking out a couple of songs or projects a week. That’s when I feel right at home.”

Before that, though, Militarie Gun will throw out a curveball that underscores the depth of thought that goes into their game. A short while ago, during a tour stop in Columbus, Ohio, Shelton and Cogan served up stripped-back acoustic arrangements of Life Under the Gun tracks “Seizure of Assets,” “Very High,” and “Never Fucked Up Once” for the alt-rock radio station CD 92.9. During an on-air interview, Shelton mentioned that “new-ish” music was incoming. Well, it’s here, and it takes the form of similarly supine studio takes on the latter two songs. 

In paring them down, Shelton has tugged at a seam of introspection that runs through all of his lyrics and let the whole thing unravel — in these versions, his voice is muted, plaintive, and matched by instrumentation that runs from palm-muted clean guitars to syrupy synths. On “Never Fucked Up Once,” Bully’s Alicia Bognanno wraps a haunting vocal counterpoint around the hook. “The whole goal was to lean into the way the lyric felt,” Shelton posits. “I think a lot of what Militarie Gun does is offset these really sad elements by disguising them as fun, energetic pop songs. We wanted to fuck with the formula — what if we make the song sound as sad as the lyrics are?”

There’s another thing, too. Shelton enjoys messing with expectations, and with people who carry around expectations about what a hardcore, or hardcore-adjacent, band should be doing. “It fucks with this notion of people talking about us being a hardcore band,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Well, how many hardcore bands could do an acoustic set the way we could?’ I like fucking with the titles, and the labels, that people put on us.”

When Shelton was a teenage pop-punk fan growing up in Enumclaw, a small, picturesque city nestled between Seattle and Mount Rainier in Washington State, he had his eyes opened to hardcore by a Ceremony show, appreciating the intensity of the music and its in-your-face edge. His home life was difficult. His parents were living with addiction, and school was a conflict-based arena for him to assert himself in. Regional Justice Center, meanwhile, are named after the facility where his younger brother was imprisoned for a time, and interviews around that band tend to focus on the inhumanity of the for-profit carceral system. 

Almost inevitably, Militarie Gun’s story has become a chapter in this wider arc. It’s something that Shelton is reckoning with in real-time as the band’s profile grows. “I’ve always known that the trauma has been what granted me perspective on the world,” he observes. “It is the reason I have empathy and why I speak differently than others.”

Shelton has positioned Militarie Gun as an outlet, both for himself and for the people on the floor who can get some things off their chest at a show. His lyrics are about reflection, understanding, and, often, forgiveness. Their music can be brash and abrasive, demanding a physical release, but at its heart is something true and painful. There is a cathartic exchange happening here that has its roots in the first time he felt at home in a crowd. Naturally, part of that dynamic comes from the fact that his life has been parceled up for consumption by other people in a manner that he now views as a necessary compromise. People can only see their own struggles in him because he has laid his cards on the table.

“For what I’m saying to matter, I have to put these things out into the world,” he says. “It can feel really terrible, like I’ve sold out my family. I wish that I could put the genie back in the bottle sometimes. Every article for a while was like, ‘His mother is addicted to drugs and alcohol.’ That sucks for my mom to read. But it is the reality, and it’s one that my mother engages with. She is the one who taught me not to hide anything, and put me on to art and literature that was about people who grew up with addiction. I can’t change my past — I’ve written about that a thousand times. I want to put myself out there as my genuine self.”

Part of that genuine self bubbles to the surface every time someone pops up under a Militarie Gun YouTube clip and starts mouthing off about hardcore and authenticity. When he got into this music, Shelton quickly glommed onto the possibilities offered by DIY, putting on shows and forming bands as his tastes developed. He brought with him a rough-hewn edge that wasn’t about tough-guy posturing. “​​I [still] have this mentality of if you’re not gonna like me, then I’m gonna give you a fucking reason not to like me,” he said in a 2021 Stereogum interview.

That confrontational aspect of his personality is embedded in these new acoustic songs — he will stand by his excitement at hearing Bognanno’s voice in tandem with his own while the internet burns itself down. “The use of the term hardcore in relation to Militarie Gun is always a funny one,” he says. “Originally, I was doing it to make people mad. I see people in the comments like, ‘This isn’t hardcore! When did hardcore music get so gay?’ It’s totally fair to be upset with us — it’s not hardcore, sonically. But you, loser man who chooses to be upset about stupid things, I’ll gladly make you mad.”

Equally, it’s perhaps safe to assume that Militarie Gun’s path away from self-sufficiency toward something approaching commercial success would have enraged Shelton back when he was a kid. There is nuance and creative freedom at play here that most fans of heavy music have to grow into. But, looking back, he’s got a different take. “Me at 16? I guess I’d be like, ‘Wow, they’re doing all this stuff that I like!’” he counters. “Even when I was really young, I thought that all hardcore kids loved Crossed Out and Modest Mouse, which was not the case at all.”

Pick Shelton’s brains about something in his orbit — hardcore, if you’re feeling lucky, or DIY, or pop songcraft, or how to record bands — and he’ll get into it in a way that’ll likely set some synapses firing in your own dome. Most of the time, though, he seems to turn that analytical streak inward. 

That is partly why he is equipped to deal with what is being thrown at his band right now, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t find it disorienting. The cogs are turning all the time as he figures out how to function in a new situation almost every day. People always seem to be looking at him now. “It used to not stress me out because I used to be clawing for attention,” he says. “Then you have all eyes on you, and you’re like, ‘Oh shit. OK, what do I do now?’”

On 2021’s All Roads Lead to the Gun II, Shelton climbed into the idea of transient popularity during the roiling “Disposable Plastic Trash.” “They say be grateful for what they give to you/Am I tweakin’ or is that kind of rude?” he yelled in its opening line, his sandpaper voice enmeshed by a needling bassline and shards of post-punk guitars. When asked if there’s anything about the band’s current situation that scares him, it’s an idea that he quickly comes back to. 

“I’ve been getting this creeping new anxiety,” he admits. “I can’t watch videos of myself anymore. I’ve got fatigue surrounding those elements, specifically social media. All of the success is great, but we are all going to be thrown away by our audience. Being in a moment means that moment will someday dissipate. I’ll be on the other side of this at some point — I’m sure in a better spot than I’m currently at — but it’s a weird thing being the subject of the public eye constantly, you know?”

Something that doesn’t always go hand in hand with prominence, though, is influence. Shelton’s approach and methods — whether that’s his prolific nature, open-hearted view on collaboration, or brass-tacks honesty — are becoming more visible with every release. “Seeing a band like Militarie Gun get out there and do what they’re doing, I realized that you can expand and grow without sacrificing that larger concept of an art project from top to bottom,” Spiritual Cramp vocalist Michael Bingham recently told me.

Shelton’s view on this is measured. It’s informed in part by the pressure he’s feeling on all sides. He wants to give back and pass on the things he’s learning about how to be in a band in the here and now, but he’s also wary of the weight that his words carry. “It’s the type of thing I always hoped for,” he admits. “I talk to people. I try to put them on to the way that I create, and the way that I see the world, but I’ve been struggling with my own influence. I’ve realized that even though I might be spitballing, people will come up to me and say things that I told them years ago, like, ‘Dude, that changed things.’ It’s hard to rationalize that you could do that to someone else’s life.”

This is the reality that Shelton and his bandmates are currently grappling with — they are making the sort of waves that their younger selves would have watched break with wide, eager eyes. A little older and plenty wiser, they are more engaged. They are seeking to understand what that sort of power means for them as artists and people on a granular level. The fact that they’re wrestling with it at all, rather than just enjoying the ride, is about integrity. Everything they do has to be real. “I think the guiding principle of punk and hardcore is the combination of aggression, vulnerability, and, at its best, honesty,” Shelton says. “That is where I will fully embrace the terms punk and hardcore in relation to Militarie Gun. We are aggressive; we are vulnerable; we are honest.”