As frontman for one of hardcore’s most exciting bands, Militarie Gun’s Ian Shelton is no stranger to the spotlight, and on new album God Save The Gun he’s using his ever-growing platform to share his story (and hard-won lessons) with the world. In an exclusive interview, the singer reflects on his journey and explains why honesty is always the best policy…
“You can sit here if you like,” Ian Shelton offers, reclining in a plush-looking brown leather armchair in a room adorned with various paintings. He seems almost sheepish about getting to the nice chair. It’s fine, we reply, taking the smaller wicker seat next to him. After all, he got there first – and, it turns out, he’s been rushed off his feet for the last 24 hours anyway.
K! is meeting the mouthpiece of Militarie Gun in Shoreditch, east London, on a rainy Wednesday morning. His feet touched British soil just 12 hours ago, and in 48 more he’ll be back on a plane. Still not acclimatised to the time difference, he woke up at 5am, knowing that it would be midnight back home and their single, Throw Me Away, would finally be out in the world. That said, the process of drip-feeding tracks before their second album God Save The Gun drops isn’t exactly a thrilling prospect to him.
“I like that the record is kind of its own context, and takes its twist and turns, and it's intentionally meant to be listened to in a certain order,” he says, sipping coffee from the café located down the perilously steep staircase where Militarie Gun will be playing a matchbox-sized show later on.
“Breaking it into pieces and giving them out of order never feels great to me. I wish we could just drop the whole album and that be it. Throw Me Away is meant to be polarising to some degree, but it makes sense within the context of the record.”
In said song, Ian finds himself going round in contradictory circles, begging to be pushed away but then taken back just as quickly. It’s self-effacing yet burying a sense of desperation as he pleads, ‘Please don’t throw me away / I wouldn’t wish me on anyone / Take what you like and then you’ll run / My only usе is to make you angry.’
“It's going to cause a reaction that people wouldn’t have had listening to it front to back,” he continues. “I think this is our classic album so far, and I just can't wait for people to hear it. But it's like the slow, agonising process of having to wait for people to hear it.”
Complying with the usual quotidian pattern of an album campaign bothers the frontman much more than the notion of exposing his soul to the world and not being able to take it back. Ian’s level of vulnerability is starker on God Save The Gun than on any other release of theirs so far, even for a lyricist known for being ruthless in his self-examination.
Growing up accompanying his mother to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings – an experience that bleeds into the lyrics of both this album and stunning 2023 debut Life Under The Gun – drummed in a sense of self-accountability, where he catches himself for his mistakes, even if it makes him terminally self-conscious. He checks himself, even in innocuous situations like taking the comfier chair. He is deeply conscious that he is, as we all are, a flawed human being. As Ian unspools his story for just over an hour, it becomes obvious that candour is not a struggle he recognises.
“My only concern is about being misinterpreted,” he explains. “I feel like we have such specific motives and goals for songwriting – the most important one being never writing the same song twice. I love putting the words out into the world. I don't ever feel shy about it. The whole purpose of the music is to say what I truly feel. The idea of shyness doesn't occur to me, because it's the whole point.”
Within the world of hardcore that Militarie Gun come from – even if, on God Save The Gun, they’re at ease with transcending its frontiers – that frankness sets Ian apart. Their sense of energy and knack for hooks doesn’t hurt, of course, but it’s his way with words that truly elevates them. He knows that, even when not stood before crowds pitting and two-stepping and screaming lyrics into his face, that willingness to speak his truth so bluntly is a means of connection with other people. And in hardcore, connection is everything.
“You think that you're saying something that nobody can relate to a lot of the time. It can feel very lonely, thinking that you're the only one who's experienced something, and then you put it out into the world and someone goes, ‘I feel the same way,’ and you realise you're not as alone as you once were,” he observes.
One could draw conclusions about the beauty of shared experiences uniting people, but Ian’s take on it is less sentimental than it is characteristically wry.
“I think that fucked-up people have a way of finding each other,” he says. “If you put two fucked-up people in a room together, they're gonna usually sniff out their similarities pretty quickly. I love that. I love that feeling of meeting someone and off-handedly mentioning some crazy thing, and then they throw a crazy thing on the pile, and you're like, ‘Oh shit, we're fucked-up together.’ That's why things like Alcoholics Anonymous exist. People love sharing how fucked-up they are together, you know?”
“F*cked-up people have a way of finding each other”
Ian didn’t let a drop of alcohol pass his lips until he was 30 years old. Until that point, he was straight edge, worried that, as both the child and the grandchild of alcoholics, his DNA would work against him. Then, his Militarie Gun bandmate Waylon Trim decided to venture outside of straight edge culture, and Ian was curious as to whether he could do the same.
“Honestly, and unfortunately, it was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Ian admits.
With a drink in hand, he could slow the constant spinning of the cogs in his brain. He wasn’t consumed by his constant, excessive inner chatter. He could be present.
“Drinking was the only thing that made me feel normal. It made me feel really good and I started chasing it all the time. Pretty instantly, I started drinking every day and I took any excuse to manufacture a reason to start drinking because of how normal it made me feel. That started translating into [drinking] by myself.”
In a way, the odds were stacked against him. Research suggests that children of addicts are eight times more likely to become addicts themselves, and people who grow up in the shadow of alcoholism often diverge down one of two paths – those who never touch alcohol and those who become addicts. Ian made those paths meet. He had the tenets of the 12-step programme as guardrails to stop him from falling into the patterns of his mother and grandmother, but he lapsed anyway.
“I’m very self-destructive,” he admits. “I grew up abusing myself in private. Sometimes the black eyes are real, and it's because I give them to myself, which I think is just a practice of really trying to make my external appearance somewhat feel like how I do internally. I have the practice of burning my life down completely and kind of starting over. I think that it's easier to do that than it is to address what's wrong, and it's a terrible practice. I don't have the reasonable way to manage it. I'm trying to find it, but I don't have it yet.”
Being in a touring band is notorious for being surrounded by all kinds of excess. And while Ian does attribute this backslide into being on the road all the time, he will freely admit to struggling with regulation and moderation in general.
“I'm very compulsive,” he explains. “If I'm into buying records, I'll buy a ton of records, and I'll spend all of my money on records. If I'm into buying movies, I buy a million movies.”
Similarly, any attempt to draw boundaries around his drinking went awry.
“The parameters would just quickly blur, and then I'd be back to doing the exact same thing that I was doing before.”
As a self-described “all-or-nothing person”, there was simply no way for he and alcohol to co-exist healthily. The only option was to return to sobriety, which he has since managed to accomplish, albeit not through the 12-step programme.
“I started feeling like I was letting people down and was just so much less in control of my life than I wanted to be. And as a control freak, that's definitely a thing I can't really have,” Ian explains. “It just was literally just having to make the decision. It can be as simple as making a decision and sticking to it.”
“I’m really appreciative for every mistake that I’ve made”
Now on the other side, Ian is philosophical about it. He knows there’s a difference between absorbing someone else’s wisdom and learning things the hard way through making mistakes – a subject he concerns himself with greatly in Militarie Gun’s music.
“I'm really appreciative for every mistake that I've made,” he says. “You can wax poetic and pretend to know and theorise on things, but until you actually do it, then it doesn't really mean all that much. Specifically with this band, we've been talking about the idea of making mistakes and coming back from mistakes, and in no way was I a saint or not making mistakes during that time. At the end, I'm back where I started. I gained perspective. I gained the knowledge that I am as fallible as I thought I was, even though I knew that that was the reality I was heading for, I chose to embrace it, and I wouldn't change it for the world.”
Those lessons are harder to forget than someone else’s advice. And as a silver lining, Ian can now pass on his experiences and feelings through music.
“If an artist is perfect and hasn't experienced anything, I'm not gonna find their perspective very interesting,” he surmises. “I think that you actually have to go through it and experience it. It’s the first-person perspective that's the most interesting. An unaffected third party is never going to have the best version of the story.”
God Save The Gun, Ian explains, is not a sobriety album. Sobriety doesn’t have much of a presence within it, actually. Nonetheless, the process of reaching that point was not just vital for the record to exist, but for it to have any integrity.
“I just felt that, looking at the sum total of everything I was trying to say, I would need to change the way I was for the record to be true and to have an actual meaning,” says Ian. “I think it would be ironic for me to write this kind of self-destructive record and not choose to change. And I hate irony. I absolutely despise it. I think that addressing what is terrible about yourself without changing it is a terrible practice. I'm telling myself I need to change and so therefore I have to change, or otherwise I'd be putting out a bullshit piece of art, which I'm not interested in doing.”
“I’m telling myself I need to change and so therefore I have to change, or otherwise I’d be putting out a bullsh*t piece of art”
Emotionally speaking, God Save The Gun is a story of three acts. The first finds Ian dealing with a craving for external validation, hungering for the glow of praise that will make him finally feel better. Entangled within that concept is his belief that people like him better when he is drunk.
“I'm a much more fun person when I'm fucked-up, and it's unfortunate that I don't know how to get out of my head and get out into the world in the same way,” he admits. “I'm always kind of spiralling about something in my mind. I'm always convincing myself how wrong things are going, no matter how great they are. It’s just a thing that I am just going to have to be a less fun person.”
In the middle of the record, he steps back into the past, contemplating how he had to twist the lessons he learned from the alcoholism in his family into convenient justifications for letting himself off the hook.
“I was trying to rationalise bad behaviour by embracing the past. Someone who's seen the things that I have and gone through what I have, and the childhood that I had, is typically a fucked-up person. I feel like I beat myself up so much about morality and right and wrong in a way that leaves me paralysed a lot of the time, and it was kind of like, ‘No, I'm owed the ability to fuck up.’ [I was] almost learning the wrong lesson from reflecting on the past – instead of it being about the strength of overcoming all of it, it became about the ability to embrace it and have a more nihilistic point of view. I don't want to be a nihilistic person. I don't want to be self-destructive, but I certainly was arriving there at being self-destructive.”
The most soul-searing moment of the album, however, is I Won’t Murder Your Friend, where Ian seeks to strip suicide of any glamour and reimagines it as the most brutal betrayal of self – the murder of self – whose shockwaves radiate out and leave those around you heavier rather than lighter. It samples an interview with artist David Choe, in which he speaks about the late Anthony Bourdain, who died by suicide, and says, “That guy’s an asshole. He murdered my friend.” Later, Ian delivers the most harrowing line of the record, ‘How are you gonna say sorry to the person who discovers your body?’
“I never had that perspective on suicide. I resented the glorious martyrdom of the concept of suicide, but I had never been given the words that he said, and it changed my perspective completely,” says Ian. “Instead of being a victim, you're a perpetrator. That thing is what has kept me on this earth every time that I've been close to the brink – thinking about the moment of discovering my body and thinking about the effect on how my brothers or my parents would feel and how different their life would be on the other side of it. I wanted to change the conversation about it, because, specifically in rock’n’roll, I grew up romanticising Darby Crash and the 27 Club and all that shit. It's so stupid, it's so selfish.”
By the end of the record Ian is letting the light in. He was still drinking when he wrote the final song, but knew he couldn’t end it in the same bleak state as he started. Every compelling story, whether fictional or real-life, is propelled by change. His was no different, especially since he knew he would have to change himself.
“It's always important for me to leave the record in a hopeful spot. I think the worst version of art is about a person that learns nothing,” he says. “I resent movies where it's just about some white loser who learns absolutely nothing and is in the same space emotionally as the beginning of the movie.”
To write is to externalise and vocalise emotions. In some way, doing that is how he has always known how to cope.
“My mom told me to never keep secrets,” Ian concludes. “I was always put into at-risk youth programs growing up and taught to externalise the way I feel and say it to somebody else. It's the most natural thing for me. When I'm going through something, everyone around me knows it, and will hear about it. I'm a very dramatic person. I love drama, and that's just who I am.”
God Save The Gun is released October 17 via Loma Vista.
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