White Reaper with Militarie Gun and Mamalarky

White Reaper -Tony Esposito [guitar, vocals], Ryan Hater [keys], Hunter Thompson [guitar], Nick Wilkerson [drums, percussion], and Sam Wilkerson [bass] -have arrived as one of the 21st century’s preeminent rock bands. Ushering in a new era, White Reaper are unapologetically embracing their collective essence -musically sincere and uncontainable on stage. Grinding it out behind independent LPs White Reaper Does It Again [2015] and The World’s Best American Band[2017], they leveled up on their Elektra Records debut, You Deserve Love, in 2019. A flurry of critical acclaim followed, while the album’s lead single “Might Be Right” vaulted to #1 at Alternative Radio and tallied tens of millions of streams. The band lit up ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel LIVE!for their late-night TV debut and Pearl Jam brought them in tow as special guests on their most recent arena tour. Guided by the ethos that their songs are meant to be immediate and timeless, the band went toNashville where they wrote and largely self-produced their fourth full-length LP, Asking for a Ride, with the help of friend and engineer Jeremy Ferguson. This time around, they directly channeled the energy of their live show in order to replicate that connection in the songs. On Asking for a Ride, you’ll get the band’s signature chrome-plated riffs, mixed with thrash, stadium-made choruses, and blissful acoustic comedowns. This is five dudes churning out bangers like their lives depend on it.

Militarie Gun can’t be stopped. In just two short years since their inception, the Los Angeles-based group have been turning heads with a menacing-yet-melodic sound that’s impossible to ignore and a creative drive that borders on obsession. Now Militarie Gun are teaming with Loma Vista Recordings to release All Roads Lead To The Gun (Deluxe): a collection that combines their dual 2021 EPs, All Roads Lead To The Gun and All Roads Lead To The Gun II, along with four new songs, capturing the essential first chapter of one of the most unique and prolific new bands. Formed in 2020, Militarie Gun is defined by the musical restlessness of vocalist/mastermind Ian Shelton. “I’ve always been the kind of person who’s very compelled to do things,” he explains. “Everything suddenly becomes urgent, and that’s how I feel about songwriting—it’s just something I have to do when the inspiration comes.” The band–whose lineup has expanded to include guitarists Nick Cogan and William Acuña, drummer Vince Nguyen, and bassist Max Epstein–draw on a wide range of influences to make something that sounds combative yet accessible, and undeniably their own. There’s the unhinged guitarwork of Born Against, the propulsive cadences of hip hop, the up-front bass of Fugazi–and most importantly, the hooks. Militarie Gun’s songs are instantly memorable, employing a melodic sensibility that’s just as informed by the work of Robert Pollard and Paul McCartney as it is by Black Flag. All Roads Lead To The Gun (Deluxe) provides the perfect jumping-on point for those not yet initiated into the band’s world, but in Shelton’s hyper-productive fashion, it also offers quite a bit of new material. The four additional tracks further expand Militarie Gun’s sonic toolbox while also hinting at the limitless potential in their singular songwriting. The first of the new songs, “Let Me Be Normal,” is a blast of sheer kinetic energy. “Can’t Get None” and “I Can’t Stand Busy People” highlight the band’s ability to organically utilize completely disparate sounds; the former all pummeling rhythms and uncorked frustration, the latter an acoustic-led, multi-movement opus that barely cracks two minutes. “Pull It Out” combines all of the band’s different modes into one anthemic song with primal lyrics that perfectly capture the lightning in a bottle nature of Shelton’s songwriting approach. “I’m not a perfectionist,” he explains. “I tend to like first drafts, it just fits my personality. Everyone is imperfect, so if a song is too, that just reflects life more.” Despite being a songwriter so clearly led by a tightly focused personal vision, Shelton is often drawn to working with other artists in a way that’s uncharacteristic of the rock music world. In March of 2022, Militarie Gun joined forces with Dazy for the critically lauded collaborative single, “Pressure Cooker.” Now, he’s recruited guest vocalists for three of the four new songs on All Roads Lead To The Gun (Deluxe). “I Can’t Stand Busy People” and “Pull It Out” both feature Woolworm vocalists Giles Roy and Heather Black, while MSPAINT vocalist Deedee provides a blistering verse on “Can’t Get None.” “I always want to expand the band’s sound and try everything I can,” Shelton explains, “but sometimes an idea just doesn’t fit my voice–or maybe it could, but being a fan of someone else’s voice makes me want to hear them on the song instead.” All Roads Lead To The Gun (Deluxe) marks the culimation of the group’s first two years but the 12 songs make it clear that Militarie Gun’s caustic-yet-catchy sound can’t be easily contained within just hardcore or pop songwriting. This is an ever-evolving band can go in any direction they might want–and Militarie Gun are just getting started.

Six months into the pandemic, three-fourths of art-rock four-piece Mamalarky plunged into a new experiment: they moved in together. Guitarist-vocalist Livvy Bennett and keyboardist Michael Hunter drove across the country, decamping from Los Angeles to bassist Noor Khan’s hometown, Atlanta. In September 2020, the trio rented a giant old house with vaulted ceilings, a tire swing, and a bare-bones little studio room. There, the band made its largely home-recorded sophomore full-length, Pocket Fantasy, due September 30 via Fire Talk. When they needed breaks, the group would take walks to a nearby creek, surrounded by tall trees and a cacophony of birds. On a particularly sublime day of swimming, Bennett and Khan soaked in the sun, watched the light refract the water, and time stood still—a blissed-out moment captured in the purejoy of “Mythical Bonds,” an ode to friendship told through playful grooves and zigzag riffs. “I really needed to write something to accurately show Noor how much her friendship means to me, and our journey as musicians and friends,” Bennett reflects. Pocket Fantasy is an instant-classic sunny-day record, imaginative and introspective, an enveloping listen of sky high hooks and keyboards that soar with joyful abandon. Its twelve kaleidoscopic tracks shapeshift aesthetically and thematically, through ideas about death and impermanence; love and gratitude; nature and technology; humor and hope. “We were just living in the album for an entire year,” says Bennett. Physically enmeshed in each other’s lives and processes in new ways, the trio connected more deeply around one another’s creative languages, honing in on their tight-knit group-logic. “We would work on it all day, and I would fall asleep with the songs in my head. It was really: eat, sleep, breathe, record music.” Drummer Dylan Hill remained based in the band’s hometown, Austin, collaborating through voice memos, and making regular trips to Georgia to record. “It felt like I was stepping into another world,” Hill says, of those fruitful visits. The record opens with “Frog 2,” a shout-out to anyone who struggles with hypermediated life on earth, a collage of images capturing the weird duality of a year spent so heavily online and also alone in nature. Over improvised Casio flutes and drum machines, Bennett’s layered-on self-harmonizing weaves together impressionistic lines about navigating interactions shaped by social media assumptions: “Projections, connections, human being dimensions / How can I introduce myself? I am a collection of cells.” It's a big-picture analysis refracted through little moments. Bennett just hopes it inspires her friends: “I want them to know they have so much imagination at their disposal at any time.” “Little Robot” is another standout, built from a seed of an inside joke about rejecting gear-head snobbery, and ultimately blossoming into a prismatic-pop tune about the weirdness of reckoning with your own emotional experiences becoming commodities: “Do you want to be spectating me / amused by me / consuming me?” Bennett sings. “It’s about feeling like I’m weaving something out of my experience that will somehow be seen by other people,” she explains. “Feeling the pressure of that. But still feeling a guiding hope that it’s worth it… Even though technology does feel a little bit like it’s melting our brains, it’s also worth it to realize that we had a way to connect with people even though we couldn’t see them. There’s times where that feels manufactured and isolating. And there are times where it feels extremely connective and beautiful. It’s weird!” Mamalarky formed in 2016, growing out of the house show scene in Austin, TX that surrounded their cooperative student housing. But their roots as friends run even deeper: Bennett and Hill met in middle school band, and they’ve played in bands with Hunter since high school. (Lead single, “You Know I Know,” nods to the big music dreams of their Texas upbringing.) When the band moved to LA after the release of their first record, they met Khan. Pocket Fantasy follows their 2020 self-titled full-length debut, the 2018 EP Fundamental Thrive Hive, and support tours with Slow Pulp, Jerry Paper, and Ginger Root, among others. When they’re off the road, Mamalarky now jokingly calls itself “tri-coastal,” with Bennett and Hunter back in LA, Hill in Austin, and Khan in Atlanta. The process of home recording helped crack open their collaborative approach. Constant tracking at home helped take off some of the pressure of the studio; the group could experiment without regard for whether songs would make the album; they could just write and play and collect material without worrying if anyone would ever hear it. “It’s more alive,” Bennett says. “And less over-thought. It felt like it was pouring out continually.” Hunter adds: “We were very much learning the home-recording process as we went along… It’s music that’s heavily inspired by the process.” Only a few elements of the record were recorded outside of their home: The Casio on “Frog 2” was tracked by Joey Oaxaca at Studio 22 in LA. And two songs, “Shining Armor” and “It Hurts,” were tracked with their close friend Ian Salazar in a home studio in Austin. Production experiments seeped in: field recordings, garage recordings of sandbags and trash can lids. Those two songs are emotional opposites: “Shining Armor” a fuck-you to haters in the Youtube comments; “It Hurts” a slow-burning break-up tune. Even on the latter, Bennett makes a winking, self-knowing aside: “I’m capitalizing on my emotions / It’s something that I do too well,” she croons. Pocket Fantasy comes to a close with “Now,” a fluttering contemplation of gratitude, of wishing time would slow down as everything picks back up again. It’s a sweet and slow-riffing moment of taking stock, knowing things can’t stay the same forever, but why should they? “Life is an experiment,” Bennett sings. “Let’s just keep living it.”