Following its surprising reunion last year opening two shows for Jack White and several performances at SXSW, Nashville indie rock outfit Be Your Own Pet has released its first new song since 2008, “Hand Grenade,” through White’s Third Man label. A video for the song is out today (March 30) and was filmed in frontwoman Jemima Pearl Abegg’s basement.
“‘Hand Grenade’ started out as a threat to the people who harmed me — that I will make them suffer as I have suffered,” Abegg says. “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.”
Be Your Own Pet emerged out of Nashville in the mid-2000s when its members were still in high school. After signing to Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label in the U.S., the group released several EPs and two full-length albums before disbanding in 2008. Abegg came out with a lone solo album, Break It Up, the following year.
The band will be on the road this spring and summer, beginning with a May 5 appearance at Atlanta’s Shaky Knees festival and continuing to the Primavera festival in Barcelona and Madrid in June.
