We give a family of new non-degenerate functionals for type A biparabolic ('seaweed') Lie algebras. These 'banded' functionals are built inductively and are compatible with the reduction process of Panhyshev. The only other known family of non-degenerate functionals -- the 'meanders' of Dergachev-Kirillov -- are not compatible with the reduction process. Many properties of the spectrum of the algebra's 'principal element' follow easily from properties of the banded functionals. This is joint work with Aaron Lauve and John Versnel (a Loyola REU student).