Militarie Gun: “It’s important to be hopeful – the worst version of art is about a person that learns nothing”

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?”

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.”

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.”

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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