By the time 2022 had come to a close, Militarie Gun had become labelmates with Korn and Denzel Curry, sold out rooms like Brooklyn’s iconic Saint Vitus Bar, and compiled their two breakthrough EPs with four more great songs on All Roads Lead to the Gun (Deluxe). But it wasn’t until Militarie Gun released “Do It Faster” in February of 2023 that the world was introduced to the version of Militarie Gun that Ian Shelton and his bandmates had always been hearing in their heads.
They’d had their imminent debut full-length album Life Under the Gun written since before the band even played their first show, but properly recording it and introducing it to the world would be a long, involved process. Ian came up drumming and screaming in hardcore bands, most recently including his beloved powerviolence project Regional Justice Center, but when he wrote the first song for what would become Militarie Gun, he knew he had stumbled upon something broader than hardcore. “I just had no clue what it was and that was the most exciting thing to me,” Ian said on the BrooklynVegan podcast last fall. “I still don’t know to this day where the individual pieces came from.”
Ian recorded Militarie Gun’s first EP My Life Is Over primarily on his own and released it in September of 2020–during COVID lockdown–and it became a full band by the time they did the All Roads Lead to the Gun I & II EPs in 2021 and they began touring that same year. Even while recording All Roads, Ian wanted to embrace his poppier, more melodic side, but his frequent producer and collaborator Taylor Young convinced him to keep things more aggressive.
“We had a lot of push and pull on the All Roads Lead to the Gun stuff because Taylor was not very much aware of, or–in all honesty–interested in the reference points for the band,” Ian told us over Zoom this past May. “He really pushed for me to keep the vocals as aggressive as possible for that record. He wanted it to be the Laughing Hyenas, and I very much wanted it to be something with more of a pop sensibility.”
Ian says now that ultimately All Roads did need that aggression, partially because–coming from a punk and hardcore background–he wasn’t entirely ready to use his voice in a softer, more pop-oriented way. He ended up working closely with engineer/producer Philip Odom, who he says basically acted like a vocal coach as Militarie Gun were demoing and re-demoing the songs that became Life Under the Gun. “There were some songs that we collaborated on the melodies, but a lot of the time, I would just go in and start trying to sing and he’d go, ‘Oh no, you’re like, trying to sing a half step higher than you are,'” Ian says. “So I would have the melody, but the melody would just be in the wrong spot, and basically he helped train my ear to actually realize where I need to be. He’d play what I was doing on piano, and I would sing to the piano.”
Throughout the process, Ian was also spending a ton of time with Taylor and warming him up to what his references for this new album were. Ian was looking everywhere for inspiration, and nothing was off limits. The goal was just to make a classic rock record, and Ian was “just revisiting pretty much anything that’s deemed a classic.” Even diving back into a song as omnipresent as The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” served as inspiration. “This song is so massive, you know? Like how do you make a song so massive?”
To make songs that massive, Militarie Gun recorded Life Under the Gun at Dave Grohl’s studio using the Sound City board, and they brought in veteran engineer/producer Mark Needham to mix. “Ultimately I wanted to make something that was really aggressive and that was seen through Taylor’s producing,” Ian says. “But then we gave it to somebody from the pop world to mix it and get a really different result.”
One of the final touches on the album came from vocal harmonies by James Goodson of Dazy, who previously teamed up with Militarie Gun for the collaborative single “Pressure Cooker.” “Coming from punk and hardcore, I didn’t know how to sing harmony at all,” Ian says, “so I called [James] in to do it. […] I learned a ton from watching the way he worked on the songs.”
When Militarie Gun were looking for a record label to release the new album, they ended up signing with the non-genre-specific Loma Vista Recordings. “I felt like being on a label that was diverse was ultimately the best fit,” Ian said on the BV podcast. “I feel like with hardcore and punk music, putting brands above anything else is kind of important. You know, you wanna be with Triple B, you wanna be with any of these really specific brands within hardcore. I kind of didn’t want anything that associated us with one style or one vibe. I really wanted to go somewhere that was multi-faceted, and really that’s what Loma provided as well as being awesome at showing artists to the world.”
The first taste of this bigger, cleaner, catchier version of Militarie Gun was “Do It Faster.” It’s a song that basically splits the difference between power pop and hardcore. The drums sound huge, Ian’s choruses are built to be yelled along to, and it still maintains the chugging grit of Militarie Gun’s aggressive roots. It’s always a risk for a heavy band to soften its sound, but fans didn’t just accept Militarie Gun’s new approach; they seemed to like it even more. I saw Militarie Gun twice at SXSW just a month after “Do It Faster” came out, and it was a clear highlight and the biggest singalong of their sets both times. “You always hope that is the case when you drop a new song,” Ian says, “but I would say probably like 95% of the time it’s not going to be the case. The fact that it happened was honestly mindblowing.”
The next single was “Very High,” a song that dives even deeper into power pop territory, and it’s fueled by one of the most earnest, plainspoken lyrics Ian’s ever written: “I’ve been feeling pretty down, so I get very high.” It’s a song that was written even before a lot of the songs on All Roads Lead to the Gun, but it took a lot of fine-tuning, and a lot of time for Ian to warm up to the idea of releasing it to the public. “We had a long history thinking that we would never release that song because, honestly, I was afraid of being made fun of. It was a long time of just assuming people would hate it for its directness.”
Ian says the day leading up to the song’s release, he was terrified, but as with “Do It Faster,” fans latched on right away. The very first time they played it live, people were singing along. “You can’t really beat that feeling.”
That earnestness on “Very High” is one of the core values throughout this entire album. He wanted to be as direct as possible and say what he needed to say without hiding behind any of the usual veils that bands–especially bands rooted in punk–use when they aren’t comfortable enough to be honest or vulnerable. That includes opening up about his own past mistakes on “Think Less” or looking at relationships gone wrong on “Return Policy.” It also includes basing an entire song around a Beatlesque mellotron (“See You Around”) and taking admitted influence from present-day Weezer. “The reason that the intro [of ‘Will Logic’] goes from a low, very quiet subdued vocal to a yell is that when I was writing it, the Weezer song ‘All My Favorite Songs’ came out,” Ian says. “The intro is subdued, and then he goes ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me!’, and it sends the song up in this really cool, energetic way, and I was like, ‘Wow, I wanna do that.'”
“Being able to be influenced by just what was on the radio at the moment…,” he adds, “literally there was no place that I wasn’t willing to take from and put into a song.”
“The big thing with all of this is not trying to cover up the sincerity and just letting it exist as it will and the way that it’s originally thought,” Ian continues. “I just didn’t want to cover up anything of what I was trying to say. Because that’s the nature of being cool–being cynical and covering up everything you mean with this stupid opacity, and I don’t have an interest in that.”
It’s easy to focus on how Life Under the Gun is a poppier, catchier, more widely accessible record than Militarie Gun’s earlier EPs, but it’s also a more musically diverse record, a more ambitious record, and frankly just better written. After the one-two punch of “Do It Faster” and “Very High,” there’s the aforementioned “Will Logic,” which has Ian softly singing over stabbing post-punk chords that would fit on a Bloc Party or Strokes record, before turning into the impassioned melodic hardcore of Floral Green-era Title Fight. “Return Policy” goes from chugging Touch & Go-style post-hardcore to a shimmering, radio-friendly chorus. “Seizure of Assets” sounds like the best ’90s Green Day song that Green Day never wrote. “Sway Too” just about qualifies as a ballad, and it’s even more powerful and memorable than some of the rippers.
One song appears on Life Under the Gun that appeared in an earlier form on All Roads Lead to the Gun–“Big Disappointment”–and the song has clearly evolved in the two years since the All Roads version was released. It began changing shape as Militarie Gun started playing it live, and the recording on Life Under the Gun is a noticeably better, fully realized version of what that song always had the potential to be.
“I played [Justice Tripp of Angel Du$t and Trapped Under Ice] that song when I made the first version, and he said, ‘I think people are gonna be talking about that song for a long time,'” Ian reflects. “And because of his faith in it, and thinking that it was important in relation to whatever else, it made me be like, ‘Okay, how do I make that statement true?'”
“I think that the difference between the two versions is maybe a 5% better difference,” he adds, “but I love that 5%.” Indeed, once you get used to the version on Life Under the Gun, the All Roads version just feels like it’s missing something.
Life Under the Gun is a lot of things. It’s a massive step-up for one of the most exciting bands to come out of the current generation of punk and hardcore. It’s one of the best rock albums of the year. It’s an album that challenges pre-determined barriers and traditions and values. It’s an album I can’t stop singing along to. And it’s a party that everyone is invited to, whether you’ve got all of RJC’s out-of-print powerviolence 7″s or you’re just getting hooked on “Very High” and “Do It Faster” as we speak.
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Catch Militarie Gun on tour with Scowl this fall, including one leg with MSPAINT and one with Big Laugh. All dates (including two sold-out NYC shows) are listed below, along with more of my interview with Ian Shelton.
Life Under the Gun comes out Friday, June 23 via Loma Vista. You can pick up a copy of our exclusive, limited-to-500 pink marble vinyl variant, as well as our swirl variants of the All Roads EPs, in the BV shop.
How did “ooh ooh!” turn into your signature ad-lib?
It started with “Ain’t No Flowers.” It just was what came out naturally, it was what felt right in that moment. I always point back to The Stooges as kind of the starting point for it. On [“Down on the Street”], Iggy hits a big “ooh!,” this super aggressive but not real sound, you know? And I think in hardcore in general, accent yelling is a huge thing. I’m not the only person to go “ooh!” on a song by any means, but I think that the way that I specifically do the “ooh ooh!,” I kept doing it on more songs out of my love for just what I consider to be accent yelling, and eventually I just wanted to treat it as a trademark because I’d just done it on so many songs. I think the song where it finally [became a trademark] was “Pressure Cooker.” James sent it to me, and that was more or less a completely finished song before I was on it. I was just re-tracking the melodies and lyrics that he sent me with my voice, but I needed to put myself into the song in a way that made it clear it was me, and that was when I used it more or less as the trademark. The whole goal is to have a pronounced identity in this whole world and ecosystem, and I don’t ever want [people] to be confused about who is singing on a song.
You’ve been covering Hüsker Dü at shows lately. What do you feel like you learned from Hüsker Dü that you take to Militarie Gun?
I felt like it was such a good reference point for everything we are as a band. It was a really big reference point for when the band started, of just going from shouting to try to learn to use my voice in a different way. They’re just such an important and influential band, and we wanted to just cover what is one of their biggest songs and have people enjoy it. We did that for the White Reaper tour because we were like, “Do White Reaper fans wanna be yelled at for 40 minutes? We should try something else.” We also didn’t want to just do a bunch of LP songs that would just go over everyone’s heads and they can’t go home and connect with them, so we wanted to try to diversify the set in a different way. Referencing them is something that I’ve always done so it just seemed like the natural path instead of trying to do some cool-guy bullshit.
Do you consider Life Under the Gun a hardcore album?
It’s hard, because it’s one of these things where I almost don’t like commenting on it because I don’t want to stick to one answer or another. I mean I think that obviously we are from hardcore, but I think that the goal was to make a classic rock record, and exist within a much broader tradition than just that of hardcore. I don’t think it’s not a hardcore record, but again it’s like, what do you consider Hüsker Dü? What do you consider all these other bands that have such disparate sounding catalogs? I just make the music that I am excited about. It’s never thought about in its creation so it’s hard to comment on in its final form, because it’s never really considered throughout the process.
We’re making a shirt right now and in the back it says ‘MGHC,’ and I’m doing it more so as a troll than anything. Because if there’s anything I love more than making people happy with the songs I write, it’s making people angry. And maybe that’s the hardcore-ness of it all; I do love pissing people off.
If you were talking to a kid who’s new to but interested in hardcore, what would you want them to know about the scene or the music?
Nothing. I don’t think that there should be an entry point. This concept that there is a way that you’re supposed to, or be allowed to ingest all this is a really stupid notion to me. The idea that kids owe anybody anything, or owe the elders anything… I’ve always been of the mindset of like, I’m trying to kill my elders. I don’t give a fuck about what ultimately came before because I’m not gonna let it hinder what I’m trying to do in this moment. Because someone else did something before me, I’m gonna do that now? I think that all of the discussion surrounding all this is really corny. Why does anyone care? This shit was dying. It was dying, and it was so pathetic. The bands weren’t creative, and kids were not identifying with anything because there was no creativity in all this, and there was no originality. And now that there’s personality and originality and perspective and identity to everything happening, of course there are more people being attracted to it. That’s what they were looking for all along and what nobody was providing for a really long time. I’m down for the chaos of the waring generations because it’s so much more interesting than what happened before, and I really do hope that this younger generation is more concerned with killing their idols than preserving a legacy based upon tradition.
Militarie Gun — 2023 Tour Dates
06/22 – Nottingham, UK @ Rough Trade
06/23 – Manchester, UK @ Outbreak Festival
06/24 – Haarlem, NL @ Kliko Fest
06/26 – Antwerp, BE @ Kavka Zappa &
06/27 – Nijmegen, NL @ Doornroosje &
06/29 – Werchter, BE @ Rock Werchter
06/28 – Hamburg, DE @ Logo &%
07/01 – Roskilde, DK @ Roskilde Festival
07/02 – Rotterdam, NL @ Metropolis Fest
07/03 – Berlin, GER @ Hole44 #
07/04 – Cologne, GER @ Gebaude 9 #
07/05 – Haarlem, NET @ Patronaat #
07/07 – Cheltenham, UK @ 2000 Trees Fest#
07/08 – London, UK @ Electric Ballroom #
07/09 – Ieper, BE @ Ieper Fest
07/21-22 – Chicago, IL @ The Rumble
09/08 – Los Angeles, CA @ 1720*!
09/09 – Anaheim, CA @ Chain Reaction*!
09/10 – Phoenix, AZ @ Rebel Lounge*!
09/12 – Albuquerque, NM @ The Launchpad*!
09/14 – Dallas, TX @ Cheap Steaks*!
09/15 – Austin, TX @ The Ballroom*!
09/16 – San Antonio, TX @ Paper Tiger*!
09/17 – Houston, TX @ The Compound*!
09/19 – Orlando, FL @ Conduit*!
09/20 – Miami, FL @ Gramps*!
09/21 – Jacksonville, FL @ 1904 Music Hall*!
09/22 – Atlanta, GA @ Aisle 5*!
09/23 – Birmingham, AL @ Furnace Fest*
09/25 – Durham, NC @ The Pinhook*!
09/26 – Richmond, VA @ Richmond Music Hall*!
09/27 – Baltimore, MD @ Ottobar*!
09/28 – Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts*!
09/29 – Brooklyn, NY @ The Meadows*!
09/30 – Brooklyn, NY @ Saint Vitus*!
10/01 – Boston, MA @ Brighton Music Hall*
10/03 – Montreal, QC @ La Sala Rossa*
10/04 – Toronto, ON @ Velvet Underground*
10/06 – Columbus, OH @ Ace of Cups*
10/07 – Detroit, MI @ The Sanctuary*^
10/08 – Chicago, IL @ Subterranean*^
10/09 – Minneapolis, MN @ 7th St Entry*^
10/10 – Omaha, NE @ Reverb*^
10/11 – Denver, CO @ Marquis Theater*^
10/13 – Salt Lake City, UT @ The Beehive*^
10/14 – Boise, ID @ The Shredder*^
10/17 – Seattle, WA @ Vera Project*^
10/18 – Portland, OR @ Mission Theatre*^
10/20 – Reno, NV @ Holland Project*^
10/21 – Berkeley, CA @ 924 Gilman*^
10/23-27 Miami, FL @ S.S. Neverender
& = with Soul Glo
% = with Code Orange
# = with Rival Schools
* = with Scowl
! = with MSPAINT
^ = with Big Laugh
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Get exclusive Militarie Gun vinyl here.