Get Awkward

The Artist

Be Your Own Pet were a scrappy, feral punk band from Nashville, Tennessee — a city not exactly known for producing this flavor of noise. Formed while the members were still in high school, the group built a reputation for ferocious live shows and a youthful disregard for musical polish. At the center of it all was vocalist Jemima Pearl, whose snarling, uninhibited delivery became the band's defining force. Get Awkward is their second and final studio album, arriving as a sharper, meaner evolution of their debut and serving as both a high point and a farewell.

The Album

Get Awkward was released in 2008 and represents the band leaning hard into a tighter, more aggressive sound than their self-titled debut. The production amplifies the chaos while keeping things punchy — short, fast songs that rarely overstay their welcome. Thematically, the record circles around suburban boredom, social aggression, and teenage alienation rendered with gleeful venom. Notably, the album famously had several tracks pulled from its original UK release due to lyrical content, which only underscored the band's confrontational spirit.

Listen For

Raw, throttling energy. The band plays with an urgency that makes the runtime feel like a sprint — most tracks are over before you've caught your breath, which is entirely the point.

Jemima Pearl's vocal performance. Pay close attention to how her voice shifts from a sneer to a full shriek across tracks like "Becky" and "Zombie Graveyard Party" — it's less singing than an act of controlled aggression.

Song structure and pacing. Notice how the album sequences its harder hits against brief moments of relative breathing room — "Bummer Time" offers a slight tonal shift before the record accelerates again into its back half.

Lyrical specificity and character work. Songs like "The Kelly Affair" and "Becky" aren't abstract — they're pointed at specific targets, giving the album a personal, almost diaristic nastiness that feels lived-in.

Themes of boredom, violence, and release. Across "Food Fight!," "Zombie Graveyard Party," and closing track "The Beast Within," the album frames teenage restlessness as something genuinely dangerous — less coming-of-age, more going feral.