God Save The Gun

About

If 2025, as Charli xcx famously prophesied, gave rise to Turnstile Summer, then Militarie Gun Autumn is surely upon u. Like their Baltimore spiritual brethren, Ian Shelton’s LA-based project-turned-band has been burrowing a path from the circle pit to the festival stage, complementing their innate, jugular-bulging intensity with mass-appeal hooks and an eagerness to crowd-surf beyond the parameters of hardcore. And with their second proper album, <i>God Save the Gun</i>, Militarie Gun makes their most concerted swing for the bleachers yet. “We wanted to make a big record; we wanted to make a classic,” Shelton tells Apple Music. “We actually took that moment to step back and be like, ‘How do we actually take this as far as we can?’ I think our producer, Riley MacIntyre, was so emotion-forward, and I would say that we’re a very emotion-forward band.” For Shelton, that meant coming to terms with being a former straight-edge kid who, just as Militarie Gun was taking off, had his first-ever sip of alcohol at age 30 and gradually developed a heavy drinking habit. “I’ve been slipping up,” he admits on the album’s gate-crashing salvo “B A D I D E A,” but the song’s irrepressible energy and cathartic chant-along chorus suggest he isn’t wallowing in misery so much as giving himself a kick in the butt to get his life back on track. “I think a huge part of <i>God Save the Gun</i> is that you don’t have to burn your life down to make it better,” Shelton say. “We think that you have to hit this rock bottom, but if you know you’re in a tailspin, you could just go ahead and choose to take yourself out of it.” As such, there’s a sense of uplift to even the album’s most incendiary moments: “Maybe I’ll Burn My Life Down” barrels in on a bruising backbeat caked in distortion, but Shelton’s despairing self-diagnosis—“I feel trapped!”—is delivered on a bed of choral Beach Boys harmonie. And coming out of the blown-out grungy finale of the suicide-themed elegy “I Won’t Murder Your Friend,” the voice of Modest Mouse lead singer Isaac Brock appears on the dreamy interstitial “Isaac’s Song” as if Shelton were being consoled by a guardian angel. .

via Apple Music

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