Kirsten Barnett
Be Your Own Pet shone brightly and briefly in the mid-aughts, with their self-titled 2006 debut standing the test of time as a garage punk-pop classic running off feral energy and teenage high jinks. Sophomore album Get Awkward followed two years later but the band burned out soon after. Vocalist Jemima Pearl, speaking in 2022, blamed a mixture of music industry bullshit and mental health issues for the split.
Last year, however, BYOP reformed to open for Jack White on tour and generally have some of the fun they missed out on as a younger band. That live return has now extended into new music with "Hand Grenade" released today via White's Third Man label. There's an newfound brawn to the band's sound but the song basically picks up where things were left a decade and a half ago. Spiky, arch, and hard to ignore. Check out the video, shot on an iPhone, below.
“‘Hand Grenade’ started out as a threat to the people who harmed me, that I will make them suffer as I have suffered,” explains Pearl in a statement. “But the song grew like a mirror to my own grief process, through anger, denial, sorrow. In the end I gain my power back not through violence, but through self acceptance and rejection of the labels others might put on me. I define myself, no one else.”