Be Well - The Weight and The Cost (2020) [Hi-Res]

The legendary Boston hardcore band Bane broke up four years ago, but they’ve been enjoying a surge of nostalgia and renewed interest lately. Earlier this summer, the great videographer Sunny Singh posted a video of Bane’s full two-hour farewell show on his Hate5Six video channel, and within the genre, it’s been one of the events of the pandemic summer. (I wrote about it here.) So it’s cool to be able to say that Bane guitarist Aaron Dalbec has a new band and that this new band has a really good new album out today.

Dalbec — who was one of the prime creative forces of Bane, and who was also in Converge right up into the Jane Doe era — is part of Be Well, a new Baltimore-based supergroup that also features a bunch of other luminaries. Singer Brian McTiernan led the DC straight-edge band Battery in the ’90s. Since then he’s produced music for bands like Cave In, Turnstile, and Hot Water Music, as well as Bane. (Earlier this summer, he produced Sharptooth’s Transitional Forms, one of the year’s best hardcore albums.) Other members of Be Well come from bands like Fairweather and Darkest Hour.

Today, Be Well release their debut album The Weight And The Cost. It’s a bright, clean, catchy punk record with a whole lot of melody and a whole lot of emo influence. All these guys come from some version of hardcore, but Be Well aren’t really a hardcore band. The Weight And The Cost is more of a vulnerable grown-man album.