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When Ian Shelton was growing up in Enumclaw, a small town near Seattle, coming home from school was a constant step into the unknown. “I was living in fear of the next fucked-up experience,” he says. Sitting in a store room above the London venue his band Militarie Gun will later fill with shoutalong aggro-pop energy, the singer is jetlagged but animated as he puts himself back there, his sandy hair peeking from beneath the hood of his sweatshirt. “Twice, my bus pulled up as an ambulance pulled away from our house,” he continues. “There was never a point when you were safe from things getting worse.”
Shelton says his childhood was defined by addiction. His mother was a relapsed alcoholic, meaning rehab, AA meetings and spells in jail. Often, it fell to him to look out for his younger siblings. “There was a huge question mark over what every day would bring,” he says. This feeling created an anxiety that Shelton thrashed out at hardcore shows, having been sucked in by Bay Area greats Ceremony as a 15-year-old. He began to write his own kitchen-sink compositions, too. “That fear needs a release,” he says. “I found music. I wrote a song that was just my mom’s name. At the time, there was a domestic violence incident and a restraining order – and I channelled my anger into a diss track.”
Shelton started out in straight edge youth crew bands, but his compulsion to create grew into hardcore projects that showed formal daring and lyrical brutality, from the iPhone-recorded screeds of S.W.A.T. to the searing power-violence of Regional Justice Center, named after the facility that housed his brother, Max, following his arrest on drug-related assault charges.
Against this backdrop, the melodic, crossover-ready indie-punk of Militarie Gun’s new record God Save the Gun is a change of pace. And yet its meticulously sculpted refrains can’t mask Shelton’s in-your-face candour. “Things you’ll never remember, I’ll never get to forget,” he barks on God Owes Me Money, a gritty anthem about making his trauma work for him.
But then you listen to B A D I D E A, which opens with the words: “I’ve been slipping up.” You realise Shelton’s sights aren’t trained on his family. In a grimly ironic twist, they’re actually trained on the puffy-eyed, sloppy alcoholic he became after the success of Militarie Gun’s 2023 debut Life Under the Gun. “The finger has to be pointed at me,” he says. “The things you’ll never remember, things I’ll never forget? There are people I’ve hurt who feel the same.”
Shelton formed Militarie Gun in Los Angeles in 2020, playing every instrument on their noisy, hooky first EP. As soon as the pandemic allowed, he started touring relentlessly, with a rotating lineup cohering around guitarists William Acuña and Kevin Kiley, bassist Waylon Trim and drummer David Stalsworth.
Further EPs followed, on Denver hardcore institution Convulse and Seattle’s Alternatives Label, but then Militarie Gun signed with Loma Vista, home to Iggy Pop and Sleater-Kinney; and to Jay-Z’s Roc Nation management company. When their single Do It Faster featured in a Taco Bell advert, it was heard by rapper Post Malone, who the band partied with after his show at the Louvre in 2024. “I felt like I was in Almost Famous,” says Kiley. “It’s 4am and Post Malone’s just handed me a Bud Light.” Shelton adds: “I’ve had a lot of those experiences and it’s fun bringing people into that chaos. Like, ‘Isn’t this fucking weird?’”
Having sworn off drinking for most of his life, the anxiety-stricken boy that was still inside Shelton in his 30s found it a welcome lubricant in room after room full of strangers. “I was more outgoing,” he says. “It helped me be present. I was more comfortable on camera – I could be a guy in a band trying to sell a record.”
Having seen so much during his youth, he couldn’t reconcile any of this with what he thought rock bottom looked like. Instead, his own words tipped him off. When he played a demo of the Wonderwall-adjacent Daydream to his ex, he noticed he’d mumbled its second verse. “Been drunk every day for a month,” ran one of its lines. “I didn’t think to change the lyrics,” he says. “But I made them harder to hear. So there would be no questions.”
Shelton is now six months sober. God Save the Gun isn’t a recovery record, but it makes it impossible to view his about-face outside the context of his upbringing – the kid who held it together for his family, now holding it together for his band. “I don’t have the ability to moderate,” he says. “Alcohol is one of the only things that made me feel normal, but I disappointed people. That’s a place I wasn’t willing to go.”
