Be Your Own Pet recently spoke to Pitchfork about some of the unusual things that have happened in the past year.
First, frontwoman Jemina Pearl talks about their label's deletion of three songs for "violence:"
I got a phone call from my manager, and she said that three of the songs had to be taken off the album because they were too violent and there was nothing we could do. We either had to change the lyrics or take them off the album. So we decided to take them off the album, and, since then, we've been struggling to figure out how to release these songs. Universal's trying to make it a little bit difficult for [XL] to release it. But now it's coming out, so we're all pretty happy and excited about it.
The label also wanted the band to play Warped which led to this:
I just associate it with a certain look and a certain style and the kind of kids at school that I thought were-- this is really bad, I'm sure-- the kind of kids that were dumbasses wearing Rancid t-shirts who thought they knew what punk rock was and threw things at people in the cafeteria.So it's like, okay, now we're going to be performing for these people. Our label is under the impression that we're going to play one date and then automatically sell 100,000 more records. All those bands have this very specific look and sound and style. It's like the new hair metal or something. There are like 10 different rules about how you write a song and what everything sounds like and looks like.
You can find the rest of the interview here.