New Found Glory 2022 Sticks & Stones 20th Anniversary Tour

As New Found Glory can attest, life moves quickly. Just three years after forming in Coral Springs, Florida, in 1997, the group were fast-tracked from local upstarts to mainstream stars on the back of ebullient pop melodies and hardcore-tinged breakdowns, setting off a blast of pop-punk dynamite that still lights the torch for modern acts more than two decades later. They became the voice of an underground movement, spurring iconic gold and platinum records (2000’s New Found Glory, 2002’s Sticks & Stones, and 2004’s Catalyst), countless MTV appearances, an entire subgenre (easycore) and sold-out tours the world over. New Found Glory has always been about the same thing - honesty, community, and positivity. After 25+ years of being a band, 11 studio albums, one live album, one Christmas album, one acoustic album, two EPs, and four cover albums, New Found Glory’s ethos has never wavered; they always strive to be the friend you always need and always understands you.

 

When it was time for Four Year Strong to prep what would become their sixth album, analysis paralysis, they were truly, finally, stumped. Vocalist/guitarists Dan O’Connor and Alan Day showed up to producer Will Putney’s studio on day one of recording without a single finished song, in stark contrast to the 40-some ideas they brought to the table for 2020’s Brain Pain.
The two spent those early days in a bedroom at Putney’s house talking about, and listening to, music, desperate for a spark of inspiration. They found it by looking back: at what made Brain Pain a success and even the genesis of Four Year Strong as a band as they rode their trademark sound – pop-punk energy, dextrous riffage and caustic hardcore spirit – to the top of the underground in the late aughts. Within a month, they’d completed nearly 80% of the album, like the ominous, metal-meets-industrial “aftermath / afterthought.” They melded combustible
hardcore rhythms with ‘90s alt-rock melodic bliss (“uncooked”), dabbled in rough-around-the-edges reggae (“out of touch”) and swerved between vibe-heavy synths and thunderous breakdowns (“STFIL”).
The result is an album that expands their classic sound in exciting ways – but through it all, it’s unmistakably them: O’Connor and Day’s distinctive vocals atop the airtight rhythm section prowess drummer Jake Massucco and bassist Joe Weiss provide. This deep into their career, there’s really nothing that doesn’t sound like Four Year Strong with these four involved.

To hear Be Well singer and lyricist Brian McTernan tell it, this new band was essentially willed into existence after a sharp, but meaningful verdict. “It would have been a whole lot easier to just make this Battery,” he laughs, referring to the iconic straightedge hardcore band that he co-founded in the 1990s. “Built-in fanbase, booking agent, touring history, nostalgia. It’s just easier than starting something new. But Battery’s got a mold, and I had to accept that this was not that. And accepting it only made me more determined because I knew there was a place in the world for this.” That point was almost two decades in the making: After Battery disbanded in 2000, McTernan redirected his energy into a prolific production career he started in the mid-‘90s, going on to leave his mark on seminal albums for bands like Thrice, Hot Water Music, Circa Survive, and Turnstile, among others. But as the music industry fluctuated, so too did McTernan’s livelihood: “The budgets were dropping, and I was just as busy as ever, but all the records that I really wanted to do, I was actually losing money doing,” he explains. “And the records that paid well made me totally fucking miserable.” McTernan made a radical pivot in 2014, accepting a project management role for a construction company, and at first, the change in pace and career felt healthy. But after a major promotion to COO upended his previously sedentary routine—he traveled between work sites, often driving 400 miles a day—major issues in McTernan’s mental health began to unravel. Issues that had been previously sublimated by the nonstop grind of a producer’s schedule now had time and space to wreak havoc. “For literally the first time in my life, I had to be alone with my thoughts, alone with things I’d felt ever since I was a little kid,” McTernan recalls, careful to choose the right words. “All of the shit that I had been hiding from with my work for my whole life? There was nowhere to run anymore.” A period of severe major depression went unchecked for years, McTernan says, until 2017, when a temporarily reunited Battery wrote and recorded their first new song in 17 years. That song, “My Last Breath,” was markedly different from everything that came before it, and in many ways, its lyrics served as a spiritual precursor to what eventually became Be Well. “We wound up putting out a song out about being in a mental hospital and me being totally afraid that I was going to pass this on to my daughter,” he points out, “and instead of the world being like, ‘Fuck you, you fucking psycho,’ people were like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that happened to you!’ It helped me realize that I needed to stay connected with this part of myself, so I started to write.” The writing didn’t stop. After making that decision to start over, McTernan continued to process his experience through lyrics and turned elsewhere for collaborators. It started with Mike Schleibaum, formerly of Darkest Hour and Battery, who is arguably the one person who did the most to make this band move from idea to execution. (“Mike believed in me and felt it was important to do this,” McTernan says. “He was the guy propelling the project along and making me stick with it. He was this guiding light the whole time.”) An e-mail from a mutual friend reconnected McTernan with Bane’s Aaron Dalbec, an old friend who was coincidentally moving to Maryland after his own band’s break-up. When Dalbec signed on, McTernan adds, “that was the reinforcement I needed. That dude knows what the fuck he’s talking about.” Next came Peter Tsouras, whose previous band, Fairweather, recorded with McTernan, and finally, Fairweather drummer Shane Johnson. With that, they went to work on what would become Be Well’s debut album, The Weight and the Cost. Make no mistake: This is an album that pushes well outside of the confines of what you know about its members previous bands. Be Well’s “ex-members of” status might, in fact, be the least interesting thing about it. Where most hardcore records conform their content to the shape of genre conventions, this album shows what’s possible when the content creates the shape: The Weight and the Cost follows McTernan’s deeply personal experience to get here and it is absolutely unwavering in its purpose. It is cohesive, relentless, and often seemingly quite dark. It is also, at times, both inspiring and uncomfortable. But McTernan is confident that this is an album that someone, somewhere, needs right now. And after everything he’s been through, he knows this might be his only chance to put it down and get it right. “What I’m hoping is not that people listen to this and go, ‘Fuck, I feel worse now!’” he insists. “I am hoping people listen to this and go, ‘You know what? I need to tell the people around me what’s going on with me.’ And that’s where I think you get to the hopeful thread, because I think that, hopefully, I made it clear in the lyrics that there is nothing good about this feeling and I don’t want to carry this around anymore.” McTernan pauses, then exhales with either a sense relief, accomplishment, or both. “I’m never going to not have depression or mental illness. I’m never going to not have anxiety. But for maybe the first time in my life, right now, I don’t feel like I’m living as someone else. For some reason, in this setting, I feel like I can finally put it all out there.” The Weight and the Cost is literally everything they have.