One of the most exciting voices in hardcore right now is Ian Shelton, who's played in a number of bands over the years, fronts (and drums in) the powerviolence band Regional Justice Center, and more recently has been focused on his more melodic and genre-defying band Militarie Gun. They just recently signed to Loma Vista, whose diverse roster includes artists as wide-ranging as Show Me The Body, Sampa The Great, and Korn, and released All Roads Lead to the Gun (Deluxe), and then celebrated with a headlining tour. The day after I caught their awesome, sold-out Saint Vitus show in Brooklyn, I called up Ian to chat with him for a new episode of the BrooklynVegan podcast, which is streaming everywhere now.
Ian and I talked about All Roads Lead to the Gun and Militarie Gun's upcoming, as-yet-unannounced new album, signing to a multi-genre label ("I kinda didn't want anything that associated us with one style"), the hand-picked openers and collaborators on MG's tour (MSPAINT, Dazy, Public Opinion, and Pony), learning to love The Beatles and Nirvana after growing up as a punk kid who was taught to hate mainstream music, and why this current moment for hardcore is so interesting and rewarding. Ian talked about feeling a kinship with likeminded artists and friends such as Justice Tripp (Angel Du$t, Trapped Under Ice), Pat Flynn (Fiddlehead, Have Heart), and Patrick Kindlon (Drug Church, Self Defense Family), all of whom share Ian's undying love for hardcore, music in general, finding exciting new bands, pushing the envelope, and bringing influence from outside of hardcore into the genre. Bands like those are pushing the genre forward, but as Ian says in the interview, they're also really moving back towards the original intent of hardcore, where bands as musically diverse as the Minutemen, Bad Brains, and Hüsker Dü all played major roles in shaping the genre, before it became so formulaic.