When the four members of Be Your Own Pet stepped into a practice space in December, 2021, it had been more than a decade since they’d all been in the same room. The quartet had last been together in London’s Heathrow airport, having just played to sold out rooms across the UK. Their trajectory had been fast—in the span of two years and starting when they were just 16, BYOP released two albums (via Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace in the US and XL Recordings in the UK), found themselves magazine cover stars, and played to ravenous crowds around the world. But the flame might have burned too quickly and they decided to call it quits.
The quartet had been living in a pressure cooker—both to put on wild performances every night and to keep up with the wild party lifestyle expected to come with their records. “You give a bunch of teenagers some money and tell them to go on tour forever? It's probably not the healthiest thing,” guitarist Jonas Stein says. “I just felt like I could not maintain a healthy emotional status and craved stability.” Vocalist Jemina Pearl was facing her own layer of stress as the focal point of constant judgment and attention singing at the center of the stage—not to mention as the only woman in the group. “We were all under 21 and were partying our asses off all the time,” she says. “And I think people had this expectation that the Be Your Own Pet show was gonna be crazy. We needed to be that spectacle every single night, and it was a lot for us to take on.”
After this white-hot run of a few years as teenagers, the four Nashville musicians moved on, carving their own unique paths. Stein led the way for four studio albums with Turbo Fruits and spun disco records as a DJ, bassist Nathan Vasquez took his own turn at the front with Deluxin’, drummer John Eatherly undertook a variety of projects including Public Access T.V., and Pearl released a Thurston Moore- and Iggy Pop-featuring solo album before stepping away to start a family.
With a fresh slate of tour dates already booked, Be Your Own Pet are looking forward to sharing this new version of themselves with fans who are thrilled to reconnect and new fans who may not have been old enough to remember their first run. But the band are also longing to reconnect with each other and a part of themselves. “Mommy is the bitch in charge, the one in control,” Pearl says. “It’s a reclamation of myself.” With that, the quartet are ready to step back out into the wild, vicious Be Your Own Pet world and rough things up again – but this time, on their own terms.
