Music

Reunited Calgary punk act Bad Habits Die Hard prove the good ones never go away

Bad habits may very well die hard, but the good bad ones are usually worth revisiting.

The proof is in Jeff Towers’ voice, and the drummer’s answer to the opening pleasantry: How are you?

“I’m glad to be playing punk rock again,” he says.

He’s doing so thanks to the reunion of Calgary band Bad Habits Die Hard, who will play their first show in almost exactly four years Saturday, June 2 at the Nite Owl.

The quartet, which also features Josh Jones on bass and vocals, and both Mike Pardy and Ryan Glover on guitar and vocals, spent a half decade in the city’s indie trenches, building a name, releasing a couple of efforts including a 2014 gruff, heavy and relentless haymaker-landing self-titled release.

And then, well, stop me if you’ve heard this before, often and recently, life intruded on those punk rock dreams.

As Towers explains, the rest of the crew got too busy with jobs and family and they had to “shelve it” — which proved a bad thing in the short run, good in the long.

“There was never any bad blood, which I think is a huge sign,” he says. “Because writing music brings out so much emotion and so many different views, a lot of times a break up is because of bad blood. So we were fortunate to never have that.”

For his part, Towers wasn’t ready to walk away and never stopped playing — in fact playing even more as part of two other excellent, less punkcentric outfits Son of Ray and The Frontiers.

Still, he was hungry to get back to his bigger kit and bang away a whole lot louder.

The seed for that was planted, as is often the case, thanks to another sign — the universe intervening, and the Bad Habits Die Hard boys being put in the same room for a show last fall by American act Against Me!.

“We hadn’t talked to each other in awhile, and we all showed up at that show, so it was like, ‘Maybe we should revisit this,’ ” he says of the fateful reunion.

“That’s how it started and then six months later we started jamming.”

How that went? Towers would put that in the bicycle category, calling the first couple of sessions “surprisingly … smooth” despite the fact that they’d been dormant for so long.

“It felt like it had only been a couple of weeks,” he says.

“Obviously we were rusty — we’re not going to say we came back and, ‘Oh, my God, it was better,’ we were rusty.

“But it was pretty easy to figure out where we were working from and what we needed to do to move forward.”

Which, of course, leads to the obvious question: Are they moving forward or is this just to scratch that punk rock itch?

“Well, we’ve started writing, we’ve got a couple of new tracks,” Towers says, noting they’ll debut one at their Nite Owl gig — the first of several more already booked and, he hopes, of many more to come.

“So, I would say we’re back!”

Good bad habits never really go away.

Bad Habits Die Hard perform Saturday, June 2 at the Nite Owl.

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