The band formerly known as Viet Cong have announced their new name: Preoccupations.

The Canadian four-piece scrapped their original moniker, which was labelled by one promoter as “deeply offensive”, last September.

In a statement released today the band said: “We apologize to those who were adversely affected by our former band name. This was never anticipated nor our intent. We are artists and not politicians, we understand that the name reflected pain to some individuals and we are happy to change it and move on and focus on our music.”

Speaking to Pitchfork, Matt Flegel added: “We were pretty naive, and pretty ignorant on the subject. We know a lot more now. If we knew what we know now then we would definitely not call the band that.

“I don’t really keep track of what people are saying online or social media. Anything I learned was face to face from people at shows, and directly from protesters, and hearing stories about Vietnamese refugees. We’ve never really read about that side of things; we didn’t know anything about that side of the war.”

He added: “We’ve learned a lot for sure. It was never our intention to hurt anyone, and it puts you in your place a little bit. It’s embarrassing, but it’s nice that we can continue on and change things and change mistakes. In a way, it’s a nice way for us to come into making a new record-having a clean slate with a new band name. I think it’s a little bit less pressure to make something that sounded like the last couple of records. You’re less attached to certain sounds and certain ideas you might have gone with.”

Last year the band explained to the Guardian that the name Viet Cong came from drummer Mike Wallace’s description of frontman Matt Flegel bouncing around while playing and “kind of shooting his bass like a gun. I said: ‘All you need is a rice paddy hat and it would be so Viet Cong.’ We stopped on that sentence and thought it was a good idea.”

Preoccupations’ new album will be released this autumn on Jagjaguwar, and they’re on tour this summer.