“I need to make pop rock music for people who find themselves fucked up,” Militarie Gun frontman Ian Shelton mentioned in a latest interview for the band’s new album, ‘God Save The Gun’. Shelton comes from hardcore punk, a world the place fucked-up-ness is transmitted via vein-popping screamed vocals and antagonistic riffs. However with Militarie Gun, he’s at all times been extra serious about spinning catharsis and confrontation into the most important songs he presumably can. He spits and snarls, for certain, however then comes out with a refrain that would fill an enviornment.
‘God Save The Gun’ feels just like the grandest realisation but of that ambition. ‘B A D I D E A’ is the platonic best of a Militarie Gun track, with its exhilarating, barrelling vitality and yell-along refrain. It additionally introduces the truth that this album has synth on it, a crossing of the hardcore Rubicon which works superbly throughout the album to open up prospects past guitar-based aggression.
Because the band dash between superior mid-tempo singalongs like ‘Kick’ and ‘Thought You Had been Waving’, punk stormers like ‘Throw Me Away’ and ‘Perhaps I’ll Burn My Life Down’, and surprisingly mild acoustic guitar-driven cuts like ‘Snort At Me’ and ‘Wake Up and Smile’, it feels just like the sort of go-for-broke rock album that when upon a time a label would have thrown a clean verify at.
A part of why it seems like such a beast is Shelton’s whole frankness and vulnerability throughout these songs, which, whereas welcome and galvanising, additionally feels exhausting in the way in which watching somebody run a marathon does. Shelton was writing throughout a time in his life the place, having grown up in a house affected by habit, he began to develop a consuming drawback of his personal. Self-destruction, self-loathing and self-reflection make up the lyrics.
“I’ve been slipping up / My eyes are saggy and my face is overrated,” he barks on ‘B A D I D E A’; “I wouldn’t want me on anybody,” he admits on ‘Throw Me Away’. On tracks like ‘God Owes Me Cash’ and ‘Kick’, he nakedly examines his traumatic upbringing; on every of those, he brings that near house by slotting in a rap interlude by his youthful brother, who began a rap profession underneath the moniker Vatican Voss shortly after ending a six-year jail sentence.
Shelton’s most candid of all on ‘I Gained’t Homicide Your Buddy’, on which he ponders his lifelong suicidal ideation, earlier than asking himself: “How are you gonna make an apology / To the one that discovers your physique? / In any case, you simply murdered their pal.” It’s obtained an enormous, heart-on-sleeve refrain, on which Shelton concludes: “I don’t need to see the look in your face / So I’ll guess I’ll keep.” It’s a hell of a track – extremely poignant, however not saccharine; wry and idiosyncratic, with out sacrificing sincerity. It’s a testomony to the sort of heights Militarie Gun attain by turning their punk instincts into big-tent rock.
Particulars
- File label: Loma Vista Recordings
- Launch date: October 17, 2025
