Militarie Gun are at the forefront of hardcore’s radical next wave

Militarie Gun like to break the fourth wall. Inside east London’s charmingly scrappy George Tavern, the venue for their first-ever UK headline show, they destroy any sense of separation between them and the fans – those at the front are probably close enough to frontman Ian Shelton to feel his breath on their faces. Shelton embraces it, leaning towards them as he delivers his lines, at one point stepping down into a forest of raised fists.

There’s a warm intimacy about it all that perfectly fits this band’s spirited and notably more melodic, alt-rock tinged take on hardcore, and the sold-out crowd are ravenous for it, jostling down the front in a manner that’s eager more than vicious. After a breakneck set that rams 15 songs into the space of just 40 minutes, the crowd roar for one more song and the band happily obliges. “This is not the cover you want, but it’s the cover you’re getting,” Shelton says wryly as the quintet launch into a rollicking rendition of Husker Du’s ‘Don’t Want To Know If You’re Lonely’. We’ll take it!

Post-show, NME joins Shelton and drummer Vince Nguyen in their van, which is parked around the side of the venue. The pair sit together on the other side of a table littered with paraphernalia, including a vocal steamer and an incongruous Peep Show DVD that belongs to their driver. At this point, they are six weeks or so away from dropping their debut album ‘Life Under The Gun’ (out now), and they’re especially eager to get into its fine details when they’ve been sitting on it for as long as they have – it was in the can before they’d even played a show. “We had the whole pandemic to figure it out,” Shelton says.

Their approach isn’t quite as scrappy as hardcore is famed for – they favour melody as much as jaggedness. It results in a sound that, while rooted in hardcore, is just a couple of postcodes from alternative rock and indie. “Yelling is amazing, but it isn’t always what you want to hear,” says Shelton. Melody carries you one more step further into integrating into people’s daily lives.”

Indeed, this melodic approach has given some of modern hardcore’s current heavyweights a mainstream-baiting edge, particularly Turnstile, whose subversive, sunny 2021 album ‘Glow On’, (which received 5 stars from NME) arrived with beautiful timing as life got back to normal post-COVID and picked up a flurry of new, more mainstream admirers as a result.

“The goal is to connect with as many people as we can” – Ian shelton

Ironically, Militarie Gun have been compared to Turnstile a fair amount, for their accessible, melodic takes on the genre. Shelton goes as far as to say that it “doesn’t make sense”, given that they don’t sound particularly similar, especially as ‘Life Under The Gun’ was already written before ‘Glow On’ had been released. “It’s not very one-to-one,” Nguyen agrees. “I think it’s cool if that’s people’s reference points for the style of music that we play, but there’s definitely different styles to the way that we [do it].”

The band, completed by guitarists Nick Cogan and William Acuna and bassist Max Epstein formed in 2020, releasing their debut EP ‘My Life Is Over’ that same year, followed by the 2022 two-parter ‘All Roads Lead To The Gun’. Despite their relatively short lifespan, in their own individual ways, hardcore has been home, in Shelton’s words, “for forever”. He himself has been immersed in the scene for close to 15 years, embarking on his first tour aged 17, and has previously fronted the Washington-based hardcore band Regional Justice Center.

Prior to that, hardcore offered him a place of refuge from his turbulent home life with an alcoholic parent, where he never knew what would await – a good day, a bad day, or even the police at the door – when he came home from school. “[Hardcore] was just what I needed at the time, being able to go along to shows and yell along with the bands,” Shelton explains. “That meant a lot to me at a young age. Even if people aren’t coming from the same thing I’m coming from, or from worse than I come from, I think we’re all [drawn to] that emotional depth. You’re looking not only for music to latch onto, but other people.”

Shelton wouldn’t be the first to extol the joy of the community hardcore builds around itself. What separates it from the communities surrounding other genres, in his mind, is that it’s “attainable”. The divide between artist and audience is only a faint line in the sand, leaving no room for ego or celebrity.

“Hardcore is very youth-centric,” adds Nguyen, “and it’s cathartic in a way everybody can relate to, because it’s less about an aesthetic and more about the energy. Whether someone is actively a part of it or just watching, they can feel involved and feel like they’re a part of something that is bigger than them.”

One of the central tenets of a 12-step recovery programme is making amends to those you have hurt when caught in the spiral of addiction. It’s about holding your hands up and admitting your faults. Having grown up going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with his mother, those principles molded Shelton’s way of thinking into what it is now, even if he wasn’t the one those lessons were meant for.

“I grew up with that habit of saying, ‘Oh sorry, it’s my bad’” he says, leaning back in his seat. “I always assume when someone critiques me that I should believe what they say about me, and so I operate from a point of self-consciousness. But at the same time, I don’t think it’s a negative trait. I think it’s only served me over time.”

That methodology leaves its fingerprints all over the lyrics of ‘Life Under The Gun’. It’s preoccupied with the human capacity for making mistakes and, intentionally or not, hurting other people. Perhaps most significantly, Shelton is putting himself under the microscope. He’s unsparingly examining his own flawed conduct in his relationships, and in a way, he’s leading by example, offering an antidote to the cultural preoccupation with pointing fingers instead of taking accountability, and allowing people in the public eye very little room for mistakes.

“I wanted to appeal from an emotional and absurdist standpoint, as a way to highlight the fact that you grow up and you will be abused,” Shelton considers. “And due to that, you will then either inadvertently or purposefully abuse someone else, and then that cycle continues.”

Sonically, ‘Life Under The Gun’ represented an opportunity for the band to sharpen the sound of their EPs to a point. They wanted to sound huge, yet they wanted to do it with grace, “using our aggression more tastefully than what you usually hear in hardcore,” as Nguyen puts it.

To shift their output closer to the vision they had in their heads of what they wanted to be, Shelton obsessively pushed himself to better his vocal technique, expanding his range after believing his skills to be “incompetent” as he was still quite new to singing. Although it took a while to get where he wanted to be, he had a whole pandemic to practice it to death before live music was allowed to resume with the entirety of ‘Life Under The Gun’ in the can before they even played their first show (which was delayed by COVID restrictions).

“[Hardcore is] cathartic in a way everybody can relate to” – Vince Nguyen

Off the strength of this record, it’s easy to wonder if the mainstream now beckons. It wouldn’t be surprising, especially when hardcore is flourishing as much as it is right now. The scene’s presence at Coachella this year was bigger than ever, with Knocked Loose going viral for their raucous display, while Militarie Gun’s California hardcore peers Scowl also started a riot of their own, proving the genre has pride of place in an environment it might not have suited. The ground has proved fertile on both American coasts, with Drain and ZULU counting as some of the West Coast’s hardcore superpowers, and the likes of Gel, Jesus Piece and Drug Church on the East.

Nguyen believes we’re already watching hardcore being welcomed into the mainstream. “I think it’s always been a bit like that, whether [the mainstream] just takes from the energy the youth have within the scene or whether it’s bands playing mainstream crowds.”

Shelton’s perspective is a little different. “I think true hardcore will never be accepted by the mainstream because it won’t be digestible in the way the mainstream needs. I wouldn’t say that because you’re mainstream that you aren’t hardcore, but I think that to be truly subversive, which I think is a trait of hardcore and punk music, that will always belong to the underground.”

But as for Militarie Gun right now, they’ve got a lot of doors in front of them wide open, even just in the UK. They sold out tonight’s show, and just ahead of them, they’ve got slots at two very different UK festivals. A few days after their George Tavern headliner, their next stop was Brighton’s The Great Escape, a notable broad church of a festival where every genre can find a home, before moving on for some European shows. They also celebrated ‘Life Under The Gun’s long-awaited release with a set at Manchester festival Outbreak, which putting hardcore’s bands of the moment, including Scowl, UK hardcore up and comers High Vis, ZULU and Soul Glo, on a huge stage with no barriers, creating maximum opportunity for mayhem – and stage dives.

How big, then, can this go? “The goal is to connect with as many people as we can,” Shelton says. ” I really have no interest in just staying in the same place as to say that we are a hardcore or not a hardcore band. It’s really just about whatever gives us life.”

Miltarie Gun’s ‘Life Under the Gun’ is out now via Loma Vista Recordings

Writer: Emma Wilkes
Photographer: Fiona Garden
Label: Loma Vista Recordings
Mgmt: Roc Nation

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