Ian Shelton doesn’t remember why he was at the airport that day. Maybe to visit his girlfriend, or perhaps a tour stop with his band, Militarie Gun. Regardless, he was feeling decidedly even-keeled when he recorded the tragic voice memo that kicks off the band’s latest record, God Save the Gun, out Oct. 17 via Loma Vista Recordings.
“When she asked me how things have been, I didn’t want to be dramatic,” Shelton, 33, intones over elegiac strings on opener “Pt. II.” “I have to say, things have not been great. Honestly, I’ve been…” The faux voicemail cuts off then, artfully leading into the chant-along, degenerate anthem of a single, “B A D I D E A.”
“I was probably in a perfectly fine position at the time of recording that voicemail,” Shelton says, Zooming from in his L.A. bedroom, fresh off a tour of Australia with post-hardcore band Touché Amoré. “But that’s the way that it always feels. That was about embracing my own dramaticism, just laying out the stakes of the world that the record lives in. I’m always living in this pressure vortex that I’ve created for myself. I tell myself I’m having a hard time, even if I’m not. I’m kind of undermining and sabotaging my own happiness.”
From the outside, that might seem a funny outlook for the leader of a band that’s been on the ascent since dropping their 2023 debut LP, Life Under the Gun, to the acclaim of, well, just about everyone. Along with rave reviews, the record earned them some prominent fans, like Post Malone, Shooter Jennings, and Modest Mouse. Since, Shelton and the rest of the crew — guitarists William Acuña and Kevin Kiley, bassist Waylon Trim, and drummer David Stalsworth — have toured relentlessly, honing their sound from what was once a delightfully DIY deluge to something more akin to the Beatles in a rage room.
As a teen in Enumclaw, Washington, Shelton started using music as a kind of diary to deal with being shunted to family members’ AA meetings, getting dumped in bad-kid classes, and losing loved ones — whether that was a dad who ghosted, a formidable grandmother who loved as hard as she lived, or a brother who went to prison as a teen. “I always felt like he kind of picked up the parental role,” says that brother, Max, who got out in 2022. “We had a pretty disgruntled upbringing with our parents. They were just all over the place, to say it in the most simplest way.”
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Militarie Gun started as a solo offshoot of Shelton’s first project, Regional Justice System, a more straight-ahead hardcore band named, in part, for the institution where his brother was incarcerated. (Max is now part of that group; he also appears on the new MG record.) Both bands’ songs were full of intense emotions, like the ones on RJC’s cacophonous “To Cope” or the Gun’s bleeding, raw “Big Disappointment.” With Militarie Gun, though, Shelton stretched the concept of what hardcore can be, weaving in melody and riffy hooks more befitting stadium rock. “I remember my mom being like, ‘Yeah, your brother’s a singer now,’” Max says. “And I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Then I saw him play the biggest room I’ve ever seen him play. I’m used to seeing the guy playing like, basically, like, condemned garages and stuff.”
Still, that venue-filling sound doesn’t dull the music’s bleeding edge. “I’ve always been a little too intensely personal, probably in ways that I shouldn’t be,” Shelton says. “I don’t ever feel normal, and I’m always having these kinds of very repetitive thoughts and memories. I can’t put them into words in a conversation with people, because it would make people uncomfortable to know what’s playing in my brain. The songs are the only appropriate place I’ve ever had for that.”
While God Save the Gun is the band’s “most polished” record to date, according to Shelton — hardcore purists might balk at the synths and strings — it’s also the most angry and conflicted. In the years leading up to the new album’s recording, Shelton says he started drinking for the first time at age 30. Having grown up among addicts, it almost seemed like giving into the inevitable. “He’s always been straight-edge my whole life,” Max says. “So even just, like, getting out of jail and seeing him drink and smoke weed — that was already crazy.”
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“It was a ‘fuck around and find out’ situation where I kind of knew what I was heading toward, and I started putting it in the songs,” Shelton adds. “I just felt like, because it was in the songs, it was a more characterized version of myself — you know, that it’s not me, really. And then when it came time to actually execute the record, and I looked at all the things I was saying, I was like, ‘Nah, I’m asking for help and I don’t know how else to do it. I need to listen to my subconscious and pull myself out of a tailspin that I was really beginning.’”
It didn’t help that all the kids on tour wanted to get “very high” with the guy who wrote “Very High.” Despite the fact that Shelton got sober around the time the band started recording in February 2024, he stresses that God Under the Gun is very much not a sobriety album. It’s about being in the eye of that proverbial storm of addiction. “Growing up around AA, there’s this kind of this fallacy that you have to hit rock bottom to ever improve your life,” he says. “I really wanted to dispel the romanticism of rock bottom, of the glorious martyr. No, you actually can choose to just do better. You don’t have to wait for the worst possible outcome.”
Getting some air at Governors Ball.
Sacha Lecca for Rolling Stone
On the tragically catchy “God Owes Me Money” (featuring Marisa Dabice of Mannequin Pussy), Max drops bars about being “addicted to getting lit” and offers a devastating glimpse into Shelton’s tumultuous upbringing. “My brother texted me after I showed him that I put him on the record, and he was like, ‘Whoa. I just realized that you wrote a song about everything we’ve gone through,” Shelton says. Elsewhere on the album, “Daydream” is a raw nerve of a song about their grandmother, who died when Shelton was 12. “Nana was this really hard-working, tough-ass woman, and, at the same time, she was also an alcoholic and addicted to work,” he says.
In the same way Shelton feels like he was fated to become an addict of some kind, he also always figured he’d die young — by his own hand. “I literally grew up with the idea that suicide is an alternative,” he says, citing his fandom of thrash legends Suicidal Tendencies. “It was something that I was singing along to at, like, 12 years old. I’ve kind of lived my life assuming at some point that would be what I would do, because I’m a control freak.” Now, he adds, “I want to remove that as an option in my life. I would love to take the idea that I will eventually commit suicide off of the table.”
“I Won’t Murder Your Friend” is Shelton’s way of banishing that intrusive thought, an acerbic, tongue-in-cheek song that feels like getting punched in the gut… over and over again. It prominently features a soundbite of chef David Chang bitterly mourning the suicide of Anthony Bourdain. “Suicide is something that has been so culturally glorified,” Shelton says. “I had this zoom-out moment about the way he talked about Anthony Bourdain’s suicide, which was that, ‘No, that guy’s an asshole. He killed my friend.’”
Threaded most prominently this album is a desperate need to belong, whether that’s with family, lovers, or the music scene itself. Take the song “Throw Me Away”: “That song is somewhat a love letter to the idea of people accepting you as an artist,” Shelton says. “I know that the things I’m making — because they’re not the same things I’ve made before — will make people angry. But if you continue to stay in the same space and not grow, then you’re also going to isolate those relationships, because you’re not being true to yourself.”
Still, it’s not all darkness and doubt. God Under the Gun also gave the band the chance to collaborate with friends who have been there since jump (Phillip Odom, James Goodson of Dazy, and Nick Panella of MSPAINT). “It feels like they’re really becoming the band that Ian wanted them to be in 2016 when we were, like, hanging out, drinking our Diet Cokes or whatever,” Goodson says. “It reminds me of when I was a kid and there were still these big rock albums but they weren’t just completely perfect — they had this humanity to them while still being gigantic. I think that’s always what Ian wanted to be doing.”
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It’s fitting, then, that several of Shelton’s rock heroes also guest on the LP. Shooter Jennings plays keys on “I Won’t Murder Your Friend” and the celestial “Isaac’s Song.” That latter song is named after Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, who also features on the same track. “We did a thing where we invited people to listen to the record when we finished it. And I remember looking over to a friend in the transition between ‘I Won’t Murder Your Friend’ and ‘Isaac’s Song’ and he was crying,” Shelton says. “That was one of the most impactful and special moments I’ve ever had in music.”
He adds that he sees Brock as a voice of reason on the album, someone who can “pick you up and dust you off after this really traumatic moment.” For Shelton, that idea connects to one of his favorite Modest Mouse lyrics: “‘It takes shit to make bliss,’” he says, quoting a deep cut from 2004’s Good News for People Who Love Bad News. “Life’s not beautiful without the pain.”