Few modern rock bands have matched the restless pace of Militarie Gun.
The Los Angeles outfit’s 2023 debut ‘Life Under The Gun’ arrived as an explosion of sharp hooks, punk grit, and unflinching honesty, cementing them as one of the most compelling voices on the scene. Before their breakthrough even landed though, they had another set of tricks up their sleeves.
Written largely before the release of their first record, its follow-up ‘God Save The Gun’ pushes deeper into the heart of the band’s identity. Heavier in its truth and sharper in its self-reflection, addiction, anger, self-destruction, and survival all weave through the record’s arcs, but what emerges isn’t resignation – it’s a determination to fight, to live, and to pull meaning from the darkest corners of our existence.
Immersive and unrelenting, it’s a body of work that turns personal reckoning into anthems that demand to be shouted back. To explore how ‘God Save The Gun’ took shape — from the raw honesty in its lyrics to the cinematic arcs in its sequencing — Rock Sound caught up with Ian to discuss pressure, collaboration, and why for Militarie Gun, truth always has to come first.
Before we even get into the new record, we have to talk a little about what came before. Following up a debut as acclaimed as ‘Life Under The Gun’ is a heavy ask. When you first started writing again, were you feeling that pressure?
“Not at all, because we wrote so much of this record before ‘Life Under The Gun’ even came out. We prioritise writing at all moments. Every bit of spare time we have, we are in the studio or in the practice space. We like being ahead of public perception, so that we’re just pursuing what we love and not caring about what anyone thinks. It has to be about what we’re inspired by and what we are looking to say. There’s a zero-pressure mentality, because we only care about what we think of the songs. We’re comfortable releasing songs that people hate as long as we love them.”
As ‘God Save The Gun’ started taking shape, it seems as though there was a turning point of sorts during that process. Was there a moment that flipped the switch from ‘this is a concept, and these are the messages other people need to hear’, to ‘this is my reality, and these are the messages I need to hear’?
“I was threading the needle on it the whole time, to be honest. I wrote the lyric ‘I’ve been drunk every day for a month’ in, and that was my reality. When I played it for other people, I wanted to pretend that it wasn’t though. In the demo version of that song, the vocals are much lower on the second verse. That was so I could hide a bit in the song and not have people question what I was saying. Attempting to think of it as a character was a tool to not have people worry about me as much. Deep down though, I knew it was me, because I don’t know how to write from anyone else’s perspective. The week before we started recording, I said to myself, ‘Okay, look at these songs you’re about to put into the world forever. Are you being honest in them?’ That was when I decided to make a change so that the record would actually mean something. Otherwise, it would be pointless, and that’s the opposite of what I want to do. For ‘God Save The Gun’ to mean anything, I had to follow the words of it.”
As you’ve gotten older, has delving that deep into yourself to write music become more comfortable?
“Honestly, I’ve always been comfortable. I’m an oversharer, and I’m a very dramatic person. I’m much more self-conscious about the musical part rather than the lyrics. I’m proud of the lyrics, and I can stand behind them fully, but I get nervous about people’s perception of our songs. We love writing catchy songs, and that’s our main goal outside of the lyrical aspirations. It sucks that people conflate enjoying pop music with commercialism, because our lyrics aren’t commercial lyrics at all. Our melodies could be perceived as such though. For some reason, people don’t believe that we enjoy writing these things, or that we enjoy having a song stuck in our heads. They assume some insidious commercialism, which is certainly not my interest. If that was the case, I would write different lyrics. I would write songs about more universal topics, instead of trying to appeal to the people that come from poor backgrounds, people who deal with addiction, and people who lived in trailer parks. I want to make pop rock music for people who are fucked up.”
When you’re being that open in your art, how important are the relationships between you and your bandmates?
“We act out of intuition, and everyone has to be somewhat the same degree of intuitive. They have to be emotionally intellectual, to some extent too. During the production of the album, there was so much talk about the way that the instruments conveyed what the lyrics were saying. At the end of ‘I Won’t Murder Your Friend’, our drummer was very opposed to how distorted the drums are. That part of the song is fucked up though, and the emotion is pure anger. It was about what conveyed that sonically as well as lyrically, so everyone had to be in line with that.”
Obviously, there are a lot of heavy topics tackled in these songs, but the way that you approach it is particularly important. When we look at something like ‘I Won’t Murder Your Friend’ and how you talk about suicidal ideation, it’s very candid, but you intentionally avoid romanticising it. How did you navigate that responsibility as a writer?
“It was important to me to not romanticise it. I feel as though I was robbed of some degree of happiness in my life because of the glorification of suicide. It’s this glorious martyrdom that you have chosen to take your own life when the reality of it is that you’re being selfish. it’s really difficult to ask people for help, and that’s what ‘Thought You Were Waving’ is about. That’s why those songs are paired together. Ultimately, someone would much prefer the uncomfortableness of being asked for help rather than the phone call that you’re no longer on this earth. It was the perspective of David Cho, who we have on the song speaking talking about the death of Anthony Bourdain. He says, ‘That guy’s an asshole, he killed my friend’. That quote changed my perspective so much. What has kept me on this earth is the idea of who finds my body. It’s the phone call to my brother of him being informed of it. But at the same time, I grew up in punk music Darby Crash and Kurt Cobain. It’s heartbreaking that kids are growing up with the idea that this is good, or even an option. I’m a control freak, and in my mind, I always thought that’s what would happen to me, so I wanted to create a public record that it can’t happen. I try to live the reality of these songs, and it’s so important to me to be truthful. This song was me trying to take it off of the table for myself, and eliminating it as a possibility.”
You wrote with some other insanely talented writers and musicians this time around – Phillip Odom, James Goodson, and Nick Panella to name a few. How did those collaborations shift the shape of the record?
“During the earliest form of the record, we thought that we were making a Dazy and Militarie Gun collaborative album. In fact, we did make one. There’s a nine-song track listing for that album, and ‘Tall People Don’t Live Long’, ‘Kick’, and ‘Fill Me With Paint’ were all on it. We started writing that straight after ‘Life Under The Gun’. Collaboration is so important to me because I don’t always have the best answer for what a song needs. Sometimes other people hold the key to the song. Nick from MS Paint wrote on ‘God Owes Me Money’, and at the time I was trying to crack the song that I thought was going to be ‘I Won’t Murder Your Friend’. I had written down that one line, and I wanted to write a dark synthy song to go with it. Nick ended up coming back with something that wasn’t right for ‘I Won’t Murder Your Friend’ but was perfect for ‘God Owes Me Money’. It’s about knowing you don’t have the answer, and other people’s perspective makes it richer. There’s a reality where the songwriting credits only say my name for the entire record, and that is a worse record.”
The band lineup solidified during the ‘Life Under The Gun’ touring cycle. How did having a stable group for the first time change the way you approached writing and recording?
“A lot of the demos were done before the lineup was solidified. I remember going on tour in January of last year. The day we left for the headliner was the first time that I put all of my demos in a SoundCloud link to listen to in the sequence of an album. David, our drummer, heard them for the first time and just said, ‘What the fuck?’ I remember his excitement growing because he knew he was going to get to touch those songs and make them real. The demos are different from the final versions because everyone got their hands into them and made them their own. It’s not a knock to the previous members, but before we couldn’t get everybody in a room together. The demos for ‘Life Under The Gun’ are exactly what the album ended up being. There’s almost no point in listening to the alternate versions because they’re the exact same. A huge part of this process was being able to communally jam the songs and arrange them together.”
Let’s talk about the cover art. How did you come up with that idea as a way to visually reflect the story of the record?
“We had so many cover arts planned for this record. There were two versions fully produced, and one of them is used on the cover of the photo book that we’re putting out. That was the original concept. A man trying to convert others to his message while clearly not knowing anything. At the time of making the cover art, I wanted nothing more than to be able to put my hands to the sky and be saved. I wanted to have it taken away from me, and I wanted the weight lifted. The reality is that there’s no one else that can do that for you, it’s you that has to do the work. Playing with the imagery of cults, we were thinking about all of these things that are sold to you as salvation that are actually undermining your happiness or your mental health. Whether it’s drugs and alcohol, religion, recovery or literally a cult, it’s not actually doing what you’re hoping it’ll do. It’s maybe putting a band aid on it, but it’s not actually addressing what the issue is. That was an important thing to convey, and it plays into the theme of the record.”
What makes this record so different from others that delve into addiction and mental health struggles is that there’s a real sense of wanting to get better and fighting for that. Of course, it’s built of ups and downs, but ultimately there’s this idea of wanting to find improvement and not wanting to wait until everything is destroyed to strive for that. Was it important to you that those messages were one of the biggest takeaways for people?
“Art has kind of reached a point of only being despondent, and I hate it. It lacks a lot of value or depth because it only embraces the most terrible aspects of life. Movies now are about white guys that learn nothing, and those aren’t the movies I enjoy. The movies I enjoy have a statement and make you feel better about your life, or better about something that you’ve gone through. Maybe that’s not always reality, but I think that art should be the promise of what reality could be. If you listen to all of the title tracks on each of our records, that’s, what they’re meant to be. It’s about saying that I know you think you’re stuck in this situation, but you have to pull through it. We wanted to take you down to the emotional low point of ‘I Won’t Murder Your Friend’, and then Isaac Brock comes in and says, ‘Head for home’. Then, ‘Thought You Were Waving’ is this acknowledgement of being so stuck in your own difficulties that you miss that someone else is struggling. The song, ‘God Save The Gun’ is meant to say, ‘We’re all fucking up, and we need to do better’. We wanted to uplift. The worst version of this record is one that doesn’t address the future and makes you feel like life isn’t hopeless. Life isn’t hopeless. Life is very difficult, and you have to put the work into changing what you don’t like about it, but change is possible.”
It’s interesting that you mention movies, because there’s a certain amount of cinema to how the record plays out. There’s a clear narrative arc…
“Movies influence me more than anything else. The record moves in acts, and there are defined arcs to the character development of the record. The intro is there to set the scene of the record. It lets you know that melancholy is the underlining emotion here. The first act is the first three songs, and they’re about the seeking of external validation for to make you feel better. Then, ‘God Owes Me Money’ and ‘Daydream’ are an acknowledgement of the past and understanding why you’re seeking that external validation. ‘Maybe I’ll Burn My Life Down’ and ‘Kick’ are about coming out the other side with the wrong message. It’s about thinking that you are allowed to be a fucked-up person, because you’ve experienced so many fucked up things. That manic episode continues in the next three songs, and then the final act is about stepping outside of yourself and realising the journey that you’ve been on.”
What has it been like to see how these songs have grown from their demo form into what they are now?
“I’m appreciative that there was the time to allow ourselves to grow. I think a lot of bands are forgetting to write records, going from demo to final versions within a month because they have to get a commercial product out there so that they can tour. We value the songwriting as the most important part of the band though, so we wrote for three years. My perspective had the ability to change over time, and I was able to get new things out of the songs. I was able to learn more music-making tricks and other things that helped me convey what I was trying to. Ultimately, time was what allowed us to create this album.”
‘God Save The Gun’ will arrive on October 17 via Loma Vista Recordings.
