The Final Chapter

Fans of the veteran hardcore group Bane are still expressing their disbelief after the band announced several months ago that their next album, a work-in-progress at the time, would be their last. While it's humbling to know that people appreciate their work, Aaron Dalbec concedes that now is the time to go. “You get older and things start getting harder, you know, dedicating yourselves to the band and stuff. We got to a point where we felt it was better to walk away than to keep going so far past our expiry dates that we become an embarrassment. We want to be able to make an exit while we still have some control over it. We didn't do this for a job, we did it because it was fun and special to us, and once we came around the bend on that, we felt like it was time to give it up.”

The final record, Don't Wait Up, will be their fourth in the studio, not including compilation albums or extended plays. Given their third record The Note was released in 2005, Dalbec admits that the hardest thing about putting this record together was trying to block out any notions of expectation and simply putting it down to business as usual. “It's hard, you have to try and toe the line. You can't get too caught and side-tracked with that mentality because otherwise you can't be honest anymore. If you spend your time worrying about trying to fill some kind of hole or fulfil a 'legacy', it's not going to work. I tried to take each song as it came, and as the record came along, I felt like the tone became more sombre compared to what we'd written previously, and that it's quite a self-aware record. There's a real feeling of 'this is it' as we get closer and closer to the end.”

While Bane might be coming to an end, Dalbec is certain that there is plenty to look forward to within hardcore. “I think my favourite thing would be when kids come up to us at our shows and have really overwhelming things to say about how our song has helped them through things like loss of loved ones or quitting smoking cigarettes or just doing things that helps motivate them in some way and that really gets to me. That's what I wanted to do through Bane: give back to hardcore what it gave to me when I was 16 and feeling fucked up and isolated and confused about how I was going to make it through those teenage years. Hardcore hasn't evolved to be mainly a line-up of people in their late 20s; it's kids in their late teens and early 20s and a lot of that just comes with not having a clue as to what's going on, and that's why it's so beautiful and exciting because it's made up of young people and there's a tonne of energy and ambition there, but there's also a lot of pettiness and naivety, and that doesn't change.”