It’s a sad and inescapable truth that the older you get, the more people you lose. Whether that’s through friends drifting apart or dying, at some point you stop adding people to your life and instead watch them all begin to slip away. The worst part is that there’s nothing you can do about it. On top of that, there’s the very likely chance of letting those people down as well. For Brian McTernan, it’s felt like a constant struggle to avoid this, and he’s channeled all the angst, fears, and frustration that entails into two new Be Well songs: “A Tap I Can’t Turn Off” and “Without a Compass.”
An acclaimed producer in the punk scene (he’s worked on records by Thrice, Senses Fail, and Converge, among others), McTernan started off in the DC hardcore band Battery and formed Be Well in 2019 along with members of Bane and Darkest Hour, among others. In 2020, the band released their debut album The Weight and the Cost, and these are the first new songs since 2022’s Hello Sun EP. “‘I was caught in the center of a storm,” McTernan shares regarding that debut. “I really couldn't see anything except the destruction, and I had no perspective on what was happening. I felt when I was writing this new stuff, I had some real clarity on not only how I was feeling for the first time in a really long time, but also how universal a lot of the things I was feeling are to other people. During the writing of the last record, I was not able to see that it was a step forward for me. It wasn't a step into the abyss; it was a step out of the darkness.”
Impassioned and unrestrained, both tracks sound like the regret that’s built up over the course of a lifetime finally exploding in a cathartic surge of exhaustion—but not without a sense of regrounding and release at the end and, especially in the crescendo of “Without a Compass,” a hardened resolve to never give up on the things and people that matter. “‘A Tap I Can’t Turn Off’ is about the fear of disappointing the people in my life who have unconditionally loved and believed in me. It’s about feeling unworthy and ending up hurting the people I care about the most,” McTernan notes before elucidating on the second track: “I have spent huge parts of my life feeling broken without any sense of how to start putting things back together. ‘Without a Compass’ is an acknowledgment of how hard that’s been, and my hope that I will figure things out at some point.”
Listen to both tracks below, and expect more from the group in the near future.
