Introducing Militarie Gun - Touring Australia With Touché Amoré

Militarie Gun don’t care much for genre rules, and that’s exactly what makes them so compelling – the LA band have forged a sound that’s constantly shifting but unmistakably their own, with a fine-tuned blend of punk, alt-rock, hardcore and pop. Their 2023 debut album Life Under The Gun was a genre-hopping triumph notching up big praise across the globe, while their live shows have kept one foot firmly planted in the sweaty DIY spaces they came up in.

Ahead of their return to Australia this July supporting Touché Amoré , Music Feeds caught up with frontman Ian Shelton to chat about the band’s ever-evolving identity, Elton John as an early influence, making a WWE entrance theme for Post Malone, and what Aussie fans can expect from the shows – including a very special surprise in Sydney…

Militarie Gun – ‘Thought You Were Waving’

Music Feeds: For anyone just discovering Militarie Gun, how would you describe the band? You’ve been called everything from punk to hardcore to pop, where do you personally see your sound fitting in?

Ian: I don’t think that Militarie Gun’s sound fits anywhere and I think that’s what makes it special. It makes it so you’re somewhat on a rollercoaster ride and you don’t know if we’re going to go off the tracks. It’s music that’s meant to deliver an intense emotional message, but do it in a way that is catchy so that you don’t realise you’re receiving something intense.

MF: Do you think your sound pulls more from the emo world, or is it more about blending broader influences from across rock music?

Ian: I wouldn’t say emo music. I mean, it’s somewhere in the sound, but I would say that as far as things we’re actually inspired by, that would be fairly low on the list. Yeah, sure. But anything in the history of rock music we’re apt to touch on.

MF: Life Under The Gun is your first full length album from 2023 and encapsulates your core in that it’s a hard one to pin down, you cover a lot of different ground. What was the creative mission going into that record?

Ian: The biggest thing with the band is just capturing what we’re interested in at a given time and at the time it was just chasing all the different influences and seeing if we could tie them together through the personality of the band. It’s anything from the Strokes to the Stooges to Modest Mouse. Like it could be anything on any given day, and just hoping that the personality that I provide to the band makes it all work together.

MF: What kinds of sounds were you hearing growing up that inspired you to take up music?

Ian: The first one was Elton John. That was like my first musical obsession. The first two were Garth Brooks and Elton John. And then as time went on, it was Blink-182 and Green Day, and then it moved to The Casualties and The Addicts. It was just like the continuum of punk rock music in general and its varying degrees of melody and lack of melody. And to me, it’s always about blending the emotion of what you get out of raw music and then putting it in somewhat of a pop structure.

MF: You’re returning to Australia this July with Touché Amoré, how did that tour come together, and what are you most looking forward to about being back?

Ian: We became friends with Touché probably 10 years ago when I was playing in another band. And we luckily did get to tour with them, I think it was in 2022, and it was a great experience. We love playing with their fans. And so when they asked us to join them in Australia, it was just a no brainer. We wanted to get back to Australia, especially after only having been there a year ago, to get back so soon to somewhere like Australia, which you don’t typically go to is awesome. And yeah, we’re really excited for the shows.

We have a special guest for one of the shows and I’m very, very excited to cover a legendary Australian song with the person from that band. I won’t say who, leave that as a surprise.

MF: You toured here with Hockey Dad last time, how was that? Did anything about Aussie crowds or something from that run stand out to you?

Ian: I mean, besides the accent, I think it’s pretty similar to American audiences as far as the desire to jump off the stage and go crazy and jump up and down. We just had an amazing experience when we were there. And there are countries in the world that you think, “God, when are we leaving here?” And Australia was not one of them.

MF: What can Australian fans expect this time around?

Ian: I mean, we’re going to be playing songs that people didn’t know then. We’re going to play a couple new songs from our new album that won’t be out yet. So maybe they’ll be bored, but we’re excited to be playing new songs. And we do have a special guest. We’re trying to figure out if we’re going to work in an Australian cover for the entire tour or if we’re only going to do it at the one show.

MF: Which show would that be?

Ian: It’d be at the Sydney show.

MF: Militarie Gun created the custom entrance theme for Post Malone’s character on the WWE 2K24 game, with the soundtrack curated by Post Malone – how did this come about? Did you know Post Malone was a fan of yours before this?

Ian: Yeah, we had the luck of having someone in his corner – his photographer Adam DeGrosse – turn him on to us as we were rolling out Life Under the Gun. And I got invited out to go hang out at a show, and we just had this lucky experience of being able to enter into his orbit and stay there. It wasn’t just a one-time thing. We hang out, he came out to our Paris show, and we went to his Paris show. So when it came to needing something from someone who works in heavy music, we were on the top of the list as far as someone he would call and so we just kind of lucked out. And when those things happen, you don’t know if they’re actually really going to happen or if it’s just a thing they’re going to assign to 10 people, and then you could or could not get it. So it was just a thing where we were asked, and I just spent a couple days writing riffs, and I probably wrote three different intros, and that was the one I chose to send to him and he luckily liked it. It was just a great experience.

MF: That’s awesome. For a lot of people, that’s a once-in-a-lifetime kind of opportunity.

Ian: It definitely is, and it’s not lost on me. I’m very grateful for the lifestyle that I’ve gotten to live through the mutual admiration of music. That’s what’s really cool about everything we get to do with touring with Touché or things like the wrestling intro. It’s like that is born from a mutual admiration of “we like their songs, they like ours”, and because of that, there’s an actual bond shared, and it’s not about opportunity. It’s not about anything else. It’s just that we like each other’s music.

MF: You’ve racked up millions of streams, landed praise from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and NME, but also played sweaty DIY shows around the world. Do you still feel like an underground band, or has something shifted?

Ian: We’re for sure an underground band. But I mean, I guess I don’t know what the mainstream is anymore. Maybe there is not necessarily a mainstream, especially for rock music, because everything’s so decentralised and spread out. But we do our best to look for other bands that people don’t know, and we are fans of subculture, and we always want to be a product of subculture. We want to be subversive with whatever we’re doing, no matter how poppy it might sound. The more poppy it is, the more message we have to put into it to offset the poppiness. I guess it would be a great aspiration to be mainstream, but again, I don’t know that that is a thing that actually exists in the modern day.

MF: So how has your journey through different scenes and sounds shaped Militarie Gun?

Ian: It’s just the ability to view anything as a Militarie Gun song. The idea that we view the wrestling song as a part of our catalog, the same way as we view “Thought You’re Waving” or “Tall People Don’t Live Long”. Three vastly different songs, two of which, you know, probably are not in our mainstay of what people listen to. But for us, it’s just the idea that we can take inspiration from anywhere. We choose to have inspiration from anywhere without shutting it down. And I’ve seen the way that people can really limit themselves or think, “Oh, that’s not us” and we just don’t have that. We just view ourselves as being able to cross whichever boundaries we choose. And it’s on us to make it tasteful and make sense for our band. But we’re willing to go anywhere with this sound.

MF: What’s next for Militarie Gun after this tour?

Ian: We’ve got a new record coming out in the fall. We’re just getting the music videos and stuff ready and talking through all the rest of the creative things that come with the record and how to best tell the story that we’re trying to tell. But the next thing is the new record. And hopefully we’ll be coming back to Australia as soon as possible off the back of that record!