Shear compliant cellular structures are being considered to replace elastomeric materials in a non-pneumatic tire (NPT) shear band to reduce hysteretic energy loss and rolling resistance.  In this paper, a rectangular shaped aluminum cellular shear band is introduced which uses a tapered bristle structure.  The tapered bristle geometry is designed to efficiently utilize material deformation by evenly distributing stresses throughout the structure under shear deformation.  The resulting cellular structures are able to achieve higher shear compliance while maintaining high shear stiffness as required for NPT applications.  The objective of this paper is to discover how a cellular bristle shear band will affect NPT performance when compared to a solid material shear band with similar effective shear properties.  An analytical model is developed to design the tapered bristle shear band to achieve a target set of effective shear properties and numerical tests are conducted using Abaqus to validate the analytical model.  Full NPT models are created in Abaqus using the tapered bristle shear band developed in this paper and a solid material shear band with similar effective shear properties.  The performances of the two models are compared to determine the effects of a bristle shear band in terms of vertical force-deflection and contact pressure.