Every year, Coachella features a “scary” band—one that ignites the mosh pit, usually inside the Sonora tent, into a blaze of circle pits, sweat, stage dives and more.
This year, that band will be Militarie Gun—but this is no mere hardcore punk group. Militarie Gun’s distinctive mix melds intense, ferocious sounds with memorable, catchy, almost pop-like hooks, meaning Coachella attendees could be chanting the band’s choruses as they mosh. “Do It Faster” sees heavy hardcore go pop-punk as crunchy guitars and gravelly vocals provide memorable hooks, while the track “Very High” brings heavy punk staples like vocal growls and guitar bends to the world of modern pop production and bright vocal melodies.
You can catch Militarie Gun at Coachella on Saturday, April 13 and 20.
“There’s tons of excitement (about playing Coachella), but at the same time, you want to treat it like the next show,” frontman Ian Shelton said during a recent phone interview. “The huge part … is that we get to go out there and attempt to be ourselves in front of the next-biggest audience, and try to find a way to make ourselves translate to people who would have never had the ability to see us otherwise. Coachella is the crowning achievement in the music world, and I didn’t think it was going to happen … and when it came through, I was just like, ‘Holy shit, all right, I guess we’re doing it.’ We all were just completely geeked on our end.”
Militarie Gun is one of the hardcore bands that’s received an increasing amount of worldwide appreciation over the past few years.
“Really, everything that Militarie Gun has done for at least a year now has passed what I thought the peak of the band could ever be,” Shelton said. “For me, it’s all cloud nine, and (we’re) really trying to capitalize when we’re given these big opportunities, but I truly feel like I never thought I would be here. You just literally go, ‘All right, well, how do we make the most of it?’ That’s really where our brains lie. Our guitar player, this is the first band he’s ever been in, and he’s playing Coachella. He skipped all the steps that the rest of us had playing DIY shows for, like, 15 years. It’s just a crazy whirlwind.”
More attention is being drawn to the hardcore genre thanks to dedicated festivals for the scene, as well as hardcore bands opening for more radio-friendly rock bands. Shelton, however, pointed out that punk is nowhere near its pinnacle of popularity.
“One of the most famous punk photos of all time is from Black Flag playing the Palladium, and I feel like there’s this kind of general non-acknowledgement of how big punk shows were at the start,” he said. “Ramones shows were fucking massive. It’s that only really the truly great bands achieve big audiences.”
Shelton credited the current renaissance to bands pushing the envelope.
“I feel like hardcore, for its traditionalism, became very small because it stopped reaching so many people,” he said. “I think this (current) moment in hardcore has been concerned with melody and things that, honestly, first-wave punk and hardcore had. That’s why it’s achieving this new audience again. It’s not about hyper-traditionalism; it’s not about the breakdown. … It’s about making a record that’s really listenable to people, and that people love. It’s about making a classic record—which, I think, was not the concern pre-pandemic, and why hardcore was so much smaller then.”
Shelton expressed disdain for the hardcore era in which he grew up, which focused on traditional standards over creativity.
“Hardcore is more or less a high school microcosm,” Shelton said. “It is very much imitating the structure of popularity … and I’ve never really been too interested in that. I was very interested in expressing myself to the fullest, in the most earnest sense possible. Over time, I was told that everything I made sucks, so I stopped doing that, and I just started playing drums in other bands, and I just listened to music for a long time. I started making music videos and collaborating with bigger artists, and through all of that, I was being a sponge, taking in every piece of art and piece of music that I could, and banking it all for whenever I decided to finally do my own band—and that’s what Militarie Gun ended up being.
“I think that hardcore at large is very conservative itself. I was fed up multiple times with what I thought the scene or whatever the popular thing was, and I was like, ‘I’m not going to do that; I’m going to do my thing.’ That started with me making a band, called Regional Justice Center, that was a hyper-niche, hyper-aggressive, noncommercial band, but I was like, ‘This is the style I like the most, and no one’s doing it, so I’m going to do it myself.’ With Militarie Gun, I wanted to make music that is inspired by Sam McPheeters from Born Against—and Third Eye Blind.”
The way in which Militarie Gun and other newer hardcore bands distanced themselves from the rigid hardcore scene helped grow the modern scene, which celebrates genre exploration and places an emphasis on the beauty of the song, no matter how “hardcore” it is.
“The scope that I wanted to operate on was just to make a song that I enjoy,” Shelton said. “On a day-to-day basis, the only metric for success was: Did I write a song I enjoy? Do I write something that I want to listen to? And if so, then the band is successful.”
Shelton offered some advice to musicians new to the hardcore scene.
“If you just write a great song, hopefully it finds people, whether that’s hardcore or not,” he said. “Coming from counterculture, if you can elevate your message and your aggression in a way that actually reaches people, then anything is possible. Scowl played (Coachella) last year, and they’re not doing the same thing we’re doing. They’re way more aggressive. The whole thing about punk music at large is that anything is possible, and it’s about forgoing all of the cautionary bullshit, and the idea that you ‘couldn’t.’ … The promise of punk is that it is for everybody, and anybody can achieve within the space if they work hard enough—first, musically, and then second, physically, as in going out on the road and trying to unlock people’s brains.
“The concept of success is a failing concept. Success changes, and that’s why I talked about the idea that (writing songs that you enjoy) is the concept of success, because everything else is so external. You could sell X amount of tickets; you could do whatever, and there’s always someone who sells more—but you can’t say someone wrote a better song than you, because it’s about how you feel about that song. If you start there, and that’s the only thing that matters first and foremost, then there is no failure at any point—because you wrote the song you enjoy. … The idea of doing something that I’m not fully 100% engaged in, in front of an audience, makes me want to die. I believe in this to the fullest, and that’s why I’m here.”