“I’ll tell you what I like: I like Orlando, Florida. Can’t wait to be there.”
Operating under the moniker Iron Lung, Jon Kortland and Jensen Ward have breathed fresh air into the extreme music scene for over two decades. The Reno natives first met in the early aughts at punk and metal shows where Kortland sold albums.
“I bought some records from him one time,” Ward recalls. “Then we started talking, and now we’re lifelong work friends.”
They soon formed a band, Iron Lung, with Ward on drums, Kortland on guitar and both sharing vocal duties. Released in 2001, the first Iron Lung demo introduced the duo’s ongoing focus on medical themes — complete with a syringe to get the point across.
Ward traces the clinical curiosity back to his childhood. “My dad died of lung cancer when I was 6 years old,” he says. “So when I was very young, I spent a fair amount of time in a hospital because that’s where he lived.”
His interest in the apparatus only grew with age. Learning in school about “all these brutal things that happen throughout the course of history, the medical side of it always kind of stuck out to me,” Ward says.
“It all culminated when I started reading up on polio and past epidemics. The iron lung is such a brutal machine, because it physically forces your body to breathe,” Ward explains. “Like when you get the wind knocked out of you, this machine just does that over and over and over again all day, every day so you can survive.”
Iron Lung channeled this chest-pounding sensation into an aural assault that caught the ears of San Francisco label Enterruption, who released the duo’s mutant fusion of grindcore, powerviolence, noise and [checks notes] comedy on a live cassette in 2001.
After releasing their first studio albums through punk staples 625 Thrashcore and Prank, Kortland and Ward decided they should create a label for themselves. They established Iron Lung Records in 2007 as a means to further distribute their own music and that of like-minded artists — regardless of genre — while maintaining the band’s partnership with its previous labels.
“When we started our label, the first few releases we put out were not bands that sounded even remotely like our band,” Ward says. “I think a lot of people questioned why we would put out a record for a band like Lords of Light or Eddy Current Suppression Ring, and we’re like, ‘Because they’re fucking good and we like them.'”
He adds, “I think we needed to draw a line somewhere and be like, ‘This is what we like, and this is what we don’t like.’ But we don’t really go around calling out everything we don’t like, because that’s just kind of rude.”
Echoing the ethos of early punk labels like Crass and Dischord, Iron Lung keeps the DIY spirit alive by taking matters into their own hands — even if they rarely reside in the same state.
“We don’t get together as often as we’d like to,” says Ward, a longtime Seattleite (Kortland is visiting from Reno), “but when we do, we certainly make the most of it. Like right now, when we’re doing this interview, we’re stuffing records. So even while we’re interviewing, we’re still doing other work that is best done together.”
In addition to Iron Lung, Kortland and Ward each have multiple side projects. During a recent Florida tour with one of Ward’s other bands, Fashion Change, he became fast friends with Tallahassee punks Protocol.
“They’re a great bunch of people who do a lot for Florida. Between Protocol, Armor, Ideation and all the other bands those guys are playing in, they’ve brought so much attention to Tallahassee specifically and Florida punk in general,” says Ward. “I think that’s a wonderful thing they’re doing, because all their bands are really high-quality and they make good music, and they’re fucking great live.”
Iron Lung (and Fashion Change, to boot) return to the Sunshine State alongside Protocol, Ideation and more of the finest acts in modern hardcore for the Marching Orders Vol. 1 fest happening this weekend at Will’s Pub. See you in the pit.
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This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2025.