Be Your Own Pet must inspire a lot of jealousy among their peers.

While other teenagers get rubbish supermarket jobs and panic about exams, the Nashville punk four-piece were rocking out with Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, supporting The Kills and getting record deals. All while making time for traditional youthful pursuits like riding bikes, parties and food-fights.

They released their eponymous debut album in 2006 - a joyfully chaotic, noisy combination of fuzzy guitars and crashing drums, topped with riot grrrl protegee Jemina Pearl howling about drowning her boyfriend, burning people's houses down and zombies. Example: "I want a kitty cat/ my boyfriend wants a dog/ we got into a fight/ I drowned him in the bog/ I'm sorry/ I'm not sorry!"

Two years on and now in their early-20s, the band - Pearl, Jonas Stein, Nathan Vasquez and John Eatherly - have lost none of their childish energy, but have slightly more experience to inform the music.

Latest release Get Awkward - a title inspired by their growing pains as a group - sees more variety in the feel and pace of the songs. There's the grumpy, teenage nihilism of Black Hole, Beyond The Valley of the Dolls-tribute The Kelly Affair and even a foray into something more disconcerting.

See Creepy Crawl, where Pearl sings: "I'm not the girl that I was before/ Feel like I'm lying each time I walk through the door."

"The first time we were recording was scary," Pearl says of making their debut, "The band was reluctant to tamper with proven formulae. Dead set against it, actually.

"Try a slow song? No way. That's not what we do! But you realise, doing other things doesn't make you less true to yourself.

"So this time we were trying to mix it up and have more variety, rather than just be attack-attack-attack, the whole way through."

The album also demonstrates the band expanding their conception of what punk is. They realised, Pearl says, there were no hard-and-fast rules they had to conform to.

"When you're younger, you have this specific idea of punk," she says. "If you don't do this, or look like that, then you're not punk. Screw that. The Stooges featured sax improvisation. The Ramones sang love songs. There are no rules.

"But sometimes you forget, because you're trying to fit into the mould you think you're supposed to.

"This time, we broke out and did what came more naturally."

  • 8pm, £9.50/£8.50 01273 606906