After performing at Coachella in 2024, Militarie Gun—a prominent figure in the modern wave of hardcore punk—is returning to the desert … to perform in a hotel basement?
It’s true! One of the craziest punk shows of the year will take place on Saturday, Oct. 25, when Militarie Gun performs at Hotel Zoso in Palm Springs. The band is kicking off a month-long tour in support of a new album, God Save the Gun, right here in the desert.
Slated for release on Oct. 17, God Save the Gun is Militarie Gun’s most polished, emotional and entrancing album to date. The singles released as of this writing offer fast punk energy and mic-in-your-face sing-alongs on “B A D I D E A”; angsty, powerful headbang rock on “Throw Me Away”; and a slow, emotional anthem in “Thought You Were Waving.” Thanks to an advance listen, I was able to hear how Militarie Gun’s innate heaviness and hardcore attitude meld with Beatles-esque production on “Daydream”; slow-dance ballad vibes on “I Won’t Murder Your Friend”; and bona fide alternative pop on “Laugh at Me.”
“(The new album) was so intentionally laid out to feel cinematic and make you feel like you’ve been somewhere,” said frontman Ian Shelton during a recent Zoom interview.
There are some strong emotional moments on the album—and the rage within a hardcore punk jam hits deeper when presented through slower tempos and clean guitars. Shelton said emotions will always be a theme in his writing.
“I’m a very melancholic person, and even if it’s anger, it’s still somewhat a melancholic interpretation of anger, where it’s very desperate,” he said. “Desperate is a term that I would use to describe, most of the time, the way I feel. It’s just clawing at trying to feel differently than I do.”
One of the heaviest songs on God Save the Gun, “Maybe I’ll Burn My Life Down,” blasts out speakers with a crunched-out bass tone and booming drums, but the song becomes heavier thanks to a repetitive, chanting chorus of “I feel trapped!”
“It’s a very desperate song, but it’s also meant to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek and comedic, and making fun of myself for that trait of burning my life down, and thinking I’m going to suddenly have all the solutions,” Shelton said. “But it turns out I’m still just the same person and have the same feelings, no matter my external circumstances.”
Shelton is an open book with his lyrics, even when the subject matter isn’t pleasant.
“Vulnerability is the only way I know,” he said. “It’s kind of a curse in that I just don’t know another way. I don’t know how to be guarded in the songs. I used to have a better hang on that, where I’d try to cover up what I was trying to say a little bit more, but now I just find that the instinct is so not available to me. It only really feels good if it’s the most brutal version of the idea. It doesn’t look flattering, what I’m saying about myself, but I don’t know any other way to say it.”
God Save the Gun is filled with straightforward thoughts on suicide, self-doubt, addiction and more.
“My goal has always been to use this as a way to externalize all of it so I could see it from a different angle,” Shelton said. “I always try to create a permanent record that I need to hold myself to: If I’m saying something in public, I need to actually live it, and if I don’t live it, then I view it as my responsibility to create the document saying that I didn’t live to that standard.”
Militarie Gun collaborated with various artists on God Save the Gun, most notably MSPaint for the synth-led track “God Owes Me Money.” Shelton said the band reached out to Nick Panella from MSPaint for help crafting a synth-heavy punk song, something for which MSPaint is known.
“I was so desperately trying to write that type of song, and write something that went that direction, but I didn’t have the ability to do it myself,” Shelton said. “… So I called in Nick, and I gave him a prompt—then he smashed it.”
The band stretches through a number of different musical genres on God Save the Gun.
“Militarie Gun is about us scratching our own itch,” Shelton said. “We’re really rabid music listeners, so we always are finding new things that we want to explore, and we really just don’t view it as possible that something couldn’t be one of our songs. We view it that, once I sing over it, it’ll sound like us. … We think it’s really boring to write the same song twice.”
Shelton said he thinks music fans will be pleasantly surprised at what Militarie Gun was able to accomplish on God Save the Gun.
“We were concerned about the timeline we were releasing, and we were all stressed out, and I was like, ‘Well, I think it doesn’t matter when we release this record, because nobody could have anticipated that we made a record this good,’ and I think that holds true,” he said. “I think when people listen to it, and they hear what it says and everything else, they understand. There are always going to be people who are doubters or haters, but those aren’t the people we’re looking to please. We’re here for the people who are willing to receive the message that we have, and the music that we have, and that’s what we care about.”
Shelton said the release of God Save the Gun will serve as an exclamation mark concluding the first era of Militarie Gun.
“For the first time, it feels like we have our legitimate band set,” he said. “As far as the creative expression, this was still all one burst from the first moment that Militarie Gun was created. I think what is happening next is truly a new era. … Previously, we just kept going, kept going, kept going. We have a follow-up EP already finished, and I feel like the next one will be the truly new era, because we’ve had a chance to stop and rest for a moment.”
Even after appearances at Coachella and other world-class festivals and venues, the members of Militarie Gun appreciate the chance to return to their hardcore roots and perform at DIY shows, like the Hotel Zoso show, which is being arranged by Sage Jackson of local hardcore booking group Hot Stuff Booking.
“We just love it,” Shelton said. “We just like chaos. We really like playing a show where everyone is on a level playing field; it’s just fun that way. Playing the same corporate venues over and over again can get really numbing, where you’re used to literally the same shit every day. I find that our memories of tours are not from the ones where we’re in what looks to be an identical green room every night and playing on some big stage; it’s the shows where things go wrong, and people can get hurt, and it’s chaos. We just love playing those shows, and we don’t want to stop doing them anytime soon.”
Militarie Gun will perform at 6 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 25, at Hotel Zoso, at 150 S. Indian Canyon Drive, in Palm Springs. Liquid Mike, Public Opinion, Forever Came Calling, Face Facts and It’s Always You are set to open the show. Tickets are $23.18, available on Eventbrite.
