Los Angeles-based punk band Militarie Gun are hitting the road this June & July playing their first-ever headline shows in Australia. Militarie Gun will take their Winter 2024 tour to the Gold Coast, Brisbane, Melbourne, Barwon Heads, Newcastle and Sydney.
If this news wasn’t exciting enough, the band announces their headline tour with a double support line-up at each show. Special guestsBlindgirlsandShock Valuewill join the tour at the Gold Coast and Brisbane shows,GeldandHuman Noiseare set to join in Melbourne and Barwon Heads, anddustandAntennawill provide support in Newcastle and Sydney.
Tickets for all shows go on sale 10am local time, Tuesday 21 May.
Visitsecretsounds.comfor full tour details.
This year,Militarie Gunhave been busy dazzling audiences worldwide with a packed schedule of festival appearances and tour dates. Fresh off the back of their appearances at Coachella in April and Primavera Sound set for this June, the band will grace stages in Australia this winter with a run of headline dates in beloved intimate venues. Kicking off the tour in Queensland, the band will take the stage at Vinnies Dive on the Gold Coast on June 28 and Brisbane’s The Outpost on June 30, then heading to Victoria to perform at The Gaso in Collingwood, Melbourne on July 2 and at the Barwon Heads Hotel on July 3. The band will then make their way to New South Wales and take over Newcastle’s King Street on July 7 before finishing up at Sydney’s iconic venue The Lansdowne on July 9. Alongside these shows, the band will also appear on tour as special guests withHockey Dadin Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney.
About MILITARIE GUN: Militarie Gun are a truly uncategorisable band. Led by vocalist Ian Shelton, the band’s debut full-length, Life Under The Gun, is almost impossible to describe without bouncing between contradictions. Is it abnormally aggressive pop music or is it unusually catchy hardcore? Is it deeply intellectual or is it satisfyingly primal? Is it a vulnerable attempt to unpack lifelong cycles of hurt, or is it a collection of world-beating, absurdist punk anthems? In the end, the answer is obvious: it’s all of it. It’s Militarie Gun.
Since forming in 2020, Militarie Gun have been releasing music and touring at a startling rate, and while Life Under The Gun feels like a culmination of this recent hard-earned momentum, the record is inextricably linked to Shelton’s past. “I grew up in a household with family members struggling with addiction,” he explains. “It was an oppressive force. We were always wondering, ‘Is it going to be a good day or a bad day? Are the cops going to come today? What am I going to come home to after school?’ You could only escape it for so many hours at a time.” The challenges of his homelife were only exacerbated by living in Enumclaw, WA, a sparsely populated rural suburb where Shelton spent his formative years longing for a way out. In this difficult and stifling environment, the roots of Life Under The Gun began to grow. As he began to pick up instruments, play in bands, and write his own songs, music quickly became a vital outlet for self-expression, but Shelton couldn’t shake the idea that it was also a literal escape route.
And he was right. After high school, Shelton bounced around the Pacific Northwest before eventually landing in Seattle, where he founded the pummeling hardcore outfit, Regional Justice Center. The band released two critically acclaimed full-lengths, toured around the world, and began allowing Shelton to live some of the things he’d set his sights on as a child. Parallel to these musical successes, he was also pursuing his other love: film. While in Seattle, Shelton began directing music videos for his bands and soon had credits under his belt for other artists like Angel Du$t, Drug Church, Supercrush, and more. The directing was going so well that he moved to Los Angeles with plans to put music on the backburner to pursue filmmaking full-time. “Then in 2020 everything got derailed,” he says. “I felt like I was heading into the final year of RJC and then I was going to move on from music, but when everything shut down that just left me with my most immediate interest, which was songwriting.”
What followed was a flurry of activity that still hasn’t let up. Shelton’s restless creative drive took over and he spontaneously wrote the first songs that became Militarie Gun, which were followed by more songs…and then more and more. The sound was decidedly new for him: still firmly rooted in punk and hardcore but more hook-driven, pulling from influences like Guided By Voices, Fugazi, or The Jesus Lizard. Shelton quickly recorded Militarie Gun’s 2020 debut EP, My Life Is Over, by himself, then rounded out the lineup with guitarists Nick Cogan and William Acuña, and drummer Vince Nguyen (Max Epstein played bass on Life Under The Gun). 2021 saw the release of the dual All Roads Lead To The Gun EPs and the start of a seemingly endless run of tour dates. Then in 2022, Militarie Gun teamed with Dazy for the wildly received collaborative single “Pressure Cooker,” which was soon followed by the band signing to Loma Vista Recordings and releasing a deluxe edition of the All Roads Lead To The Gun EPs that included even more new material. All of this along with Shelton’s production work and guest appearances with groups like MSPAINT, Public Opinion, and Cold Mega.
Militarie Gun soon had the makings of Life Under The Gun: the kind of debut album that feels like a true arrival, one forged by a lifetime of experience and effort that’s now allowed an artist to fully come into their own. Engineered by Taylor Young at The Pit Recording Studio, the album’s 12 tracks take all of the best parts of Militarie Gun’s earlier work and amps them up to the highest possible degree. It sounds massive without sacrificing the punk spark–full of driving drums, distorted bass lines, and of course Shelton’s instantly recognizable roar–only this time everything is bigger and even catchier. “This is what I thought we sounded like all along,” Shelton laughs. “It’s always felt like a melody-forward band to me, but I think now we’re finally achieving what I was always setting out to do.”