Peaches' Personal Best
As lewd and loving as ever on her new album No Lube So Rude, Peaches talks Alan Pedder through five of her own highlights from her trailblazing debut to now.
All lives are full of little deaths, and that goes for music too. When artists we once loved suddenly reveal their true, ugly colours, it can feel like they have stabbed us in the brain’s pleasure centre.
Okay, so maybe no one expected Nicki ‘MAGA’ Minaj to be a great person, but turncoat former ally Roísín Murphy? Yeah, that one stings. That’s why the untarnished reign of Peaches is to be celebrated, loudly. Few artists have so consistently shown up for their community, and for so long, as she has. Few artists have pushed their mode of expression to the limits as much as she has, and even fewer have shown as much capacity for reflexive growth as she has.
Whether it’s uplifting sex workers through her art or adapting her lyrics in tune with expanding ideas of what true inclusivity and allyship look like, Peaches is and always has been one-of-one. A genuine original whose influence throughout the years – on music, on fashion, on the art world, and on speaking the fuck up – is larger than she could possibly have imagined when starting out as a scrappy cancer survivor in the trenches of electroclash.
All this is to say that, whether you get her or not – and plenty don’t – Peaches is important with a capital I. She’s also a scream. With No Lube So Rude, her first album in a decade, the Berlin-based provocateur is on flying, filthy form, banging through a sonically dauntless run of OTT, sometimes jawdropping statements and sidebars. Co-produced with anonymous entity The Squirt Deluxe, Peaches takes bigger swings here with melodies, instrumentation, and tonal shifts, touching on everything from trip-hop to hyperpop and dance-punk to techno. It’s lewd, of course, but in a loving, multilayered way. Though, a word of warning for foodies before you press play: you may never look at panna cotta in quite the same way again.
Peaches has said in the past that she’s felt the need to reintroduce herself with every album, and No Lube So Rude is perhaps even more under pressure in that regard. But whichever moment you meet her in, her motivation never wavers. “I feel like I am who I am,” she tells BEST FIT over video call from Berlin. “And I feel like, given the times we’re in right now, I just want to be very direct and very clear about what my intention is, with my music and with my sense of community and understanding that people need to be who they need to be. I’m just continuing the message. And I feel like now is the right time, perhaps more than ever, to re-establish that.”
"You can still be your nasty self but always feel the love in it, or else there’s no point"
No Lube So Rude may be a comical and perfectly Peaches title, but it also speaks to the righteous anger so many are feeling in a world apparently run by paedos and incontinent man-babies. We’re being forcefed horrendous violence, massive inequality, rampant racism, and woman-hate on a catastrophic level, and Peaches, like any rational person, is absolutely sick of it. Raised in a secular family within a conservative Jewish community in 1970s Toronto, she says she feels duped by all the propaganda she was surrounded by. “I grew up hearing that Israel was a desert land. I had no idea what the Nakba was. I had no idea about any of it,” she says. “It feels really depressing that the community doesn’t understand the bigger picture or understand how history is repeating itself.”
Listen carefully to No Lube So Rude and you’ll hear one phrase, “Take it in the heart,” appear in more than one song, and that was quite deliberate. Peaches sees it as a reckoning with herself, a reminder that if you’re hurting you have to take that hurt in through the heart rather than the brain: “Not avoiding it, not just putting it aside, but really looking inside to where the heart of you lies.”
It’s also quite deliberate that No Lube So Rude ends on a solacing note, with Peaches’ declaration “I wanna be love” – note the missing ‘d’. It’s not to be loved, but to be love itself. “I feel like that’s what we’re missing,” she says. “People have to understand that they are the love to give, and it’s okay to express that. You can still be your nasty self but always feel the love in it, or else there’s no point.”
When it came to choosing five songs that best represent her, Peaches admits that all her songs are her babies and that she just had to try and not overthink it. “I just tried to think of the ones that were in my head at that moment, so it might change tomorrow but I’ll stick with these ones for now.”
"Lovertits" (2000)
BEST FIT: Most people automatically reach for “Fuck the Pain Away” when The Teaches of Peaches comes up in conversation, but it was “Lovertits” that was the lead single and, as I understand it, the song that really cemented the direction and sound of the album.
PEACHES: Yeah, it was, definitely. It was one of the first ones I wrote for The Teaches of Peaches, and I made the decision to put it out as a single first because I just felt like it was really strong. After it came out, I think it was Justine Frischmann who was the first one to say to me that the song is “very ESG.” I had no idea who they were, and it was so exciting to hear them for the first time and to feel aligned with ESG’s music, which became such an inspiration for me after that.
It’s actually a very emotional song about a lost love. I never said so at the time, but it’s a breakup song. The word ‘lovertits’ is used more as a term of endearment, or a little inside joke between two people, like “I’m your baby,” but a new way of saying it.
I just feel like this song came out so organically of just singing “I’m your lovertits” in that way, and it still always just feels so good to sing it. The song was actually written with a drum machine and guitar, but then I transferred it all over to the machine. I love the way the bassline really hits, and I love the way the filtering augments it and brings it even more power. I was trying to move on with my life but trying also not to wallow in or lean into any sort of victimhood, and I think you can really feel it.
You’ve talked a little bit in the past about how, when making The Teaches of Peaches, you were thinking of people like Lydia Lunch and riot grrrl movement and how you wanted to be have a similar message but also a bit more humour and a bit more wordplay.
I think it was more about wanting to bring my sense of humour, because I can’t say that people like Kathleen Hanna and Lydia Lunch didn’t have a sense of humour in their work. It was just that I wanted to express it in a different sort of way. And I’m sure that for some people it feels dark, and for some people it feels very comical, but for me, The Teaches of Peaches was sort of like the middle ground between being passionate and also having some humour involved that wasn’t, like, totally campy.
I didn’t think it would be popular or anything, I was just drawn to this raw, direct sound that I felt, in the late ‘90s, music was moving away from. But I wasn’t interested in working with a lot of producers to make something that sounded perfect. I wanted to make something this way.
"Tombstone, Baby" (2003)
BEST FIT: At the risk of sounding naïve, I ventured onto Urban Dictionary to try and figure out what ‘tombstone’ meant in this context, and that was pretty eye opening… What’s the story with this song, and what earns it a place in this list?
PEACHES: The day I wrote this song was a really, really dark day in Berlin. I was in my studio in Tacheles, which is an old squat, and I was feeling that darkness but also had a little snap in my step, if you know what I mean. Like I was skipping through a graveyard or something. I was also thinking about bands like Suicide and The Cramps, because that’s what I was listening to a lot at the time, and “Tombstone, Baby” just kind of came out in that way. It’s an electronic sound but then it’s punctuated with guitar at the end, and it has this kind of slapback-y Cramps, Alan Vega, maybe even an Elvis-y voice.
I like how poetic the song is. I think it evokes this full image of, like I said, skipping through a graveyard. It’s reckoning with the Berlin-in-the-middle-of-winter feeling but loving the darkness and having a positivity about it. The lyrics are sort of like a warm breakfast, you know? “I’m the French toast, give me syrup,” “Coffee with your cream” – to me that just trying to get something out of all the darkness. Putting in more sugar and more cream because you don’t want it to be bitter. You’re just trying to find something to fill you up in that way.
I'm just really happy to see a song from Fatherfucker from here. I feel like that album of yours deserves more love generally. How has your relationship to it changed over the years?
It's very interesting, because when that album came out, people in music circles were critical and very disappointed, even though “Operate” was a hit – it was used in Mean Girls – and “Kick It” with Iggy Pop was quite popular too. But people were very, very upset. For me, though, I love this album so much because I took the concept even further. The Teaches of Peaches was sort of like a sexy, woman coming of age kind of thing, and Fatherfucker was like a twisted version of that.
It was the first time that I was really twisting things and opening up all the queer valves. So you have songs like “Shake Yer Dix”, which sounds pretty binary right now so it could be “Shake Yer Bits”. You have “I U She”, which I now sing always as “I U she, I U he, he I they.” And you have the song “Rock 'N' Roll” which is a kind of sarcastic take on being a big macho rock star but I’m just singing “Rock and roll” over and over again. So, the conceptual element was even larger on Fatherfucker, which of course is a play on ‘motherfucker,’ and I feel like, for the queer community, this is the album that really resonated with them.
Also, on that tour, I just really cemented my understanding of how important it is to be inclusive and how important it is to speak to your community. So, even though musically it wasn’t very well received, in terms of how I was building community and how I was building my art and my audience, I think it was very successful.
As a queer person, I totally agree. I revisited some of the reviews recently and I was like, “What the hell are these people listening to? A completely different album?”
Well, I guess it was just too much. The Teaches of Peaches was still seductive enough, but once I started to break the gender valves open, it was too much. It wasn’t time. People were not ready for that, musically, and that’s fine because it didn’t matter. Fatherfucker wasn’t about getting ahead in the music industry. I wasn’t trying to build myself up into somebody who could headline Glastonbury or anything like that.
"Boys Wanna Be Her" (2006)
BEST FIT: There have been an insane number of syncs for this track, with more appearing every year, which kind of speaks to how much everyone seems to love this song. What is that you personally love about?
PEACHES: I love the message. I was thinking a lot about all those songs that are about some kind of hero figure, who is always male identified, who comes to town and all the men want to be him and all the women want to be sexed by, and I wanted to flip that. I wanted to make the hero someone who was female identified, who everyone wants to be with and have sex with.
I had a kind of AC/DC-style rock riff in my mind, to kind of put a twist on a song like “T.N.T.” which has that lyric about locking up your daughter and your wife because “the man is back in town.” With that, I wanted to bring the power back and bring some queerness into the rock sphere, like talking about Stonewall, for example.
I also just love the recording. There’s no guitar solo. It’s just very minimal, it’s super direct, and it has this catchy chorus. I just love the fist pumping feel of it, and I am super blown away by the way it’s been used in all these different syncs. It’s always been used in these contexts that really fit and that accentuate the power of the song. I could never have imagined it would have such a life, and that it would just go on and on. That it could be used in women’s NBA basketball or in a CoverGirl commercial for a women’s motocross rider, or that Samantha Bee, who is a political, awesome comedian, would use it for her them song. I love these different ways in which it has been used over the years.
I actually wrote this song while I was writing with Greg Kurstin, who co-wrote a couple of the other songs on Impeach My Bush, “Tent in Your Pants” and “Downtown”. I had these ideas for “Boys Wanna Be Her” and I asked Greg to help play on it, so it became a collaboration between me, Greg, and Mickey Petralia who was co-producing the album. I would sing the ideas to Greg and he would quite generously play those, and then Mickey took that and made sure it had just the right feel between electronic and rock, almost like an early Daft Punk production.
I like the reference to Cindy Lauper’s “She Bop” in there, too.
Oh yeah, I love that song. That song is brilliant, and it also has a similar kind of singing.
The video for "Boys Wanna Be Her" is wild, where you and your band are smashing yourselves up until you bleed.
Yeah, it starts like a glam rock video with these tough women rockers going hardcore and then it turns into Carrie. Oddly enough, the only thing that had to be censored was when the guitarist picks up a broke drumstick and stabs it into her arm. Like, that’s something you can’t show on MTV or whatever.
"Rub" (2015)
BEST FIT: The Rub album was a back-to-basics one for you, pulling up with this quite lean electronic sound that this title track is a great example of. What is about this song earns it a place on your list?
PEACHES: Yeah, I love that it embodies that lean, dark sound. I also love playing it live because I get to sing “Come with me / You know me / Feel free,” and get the audience to shout “Peachy”. It’s so funny because it seems like an unlikely sort of singalong, but it always gets people and it always becomes a singalong, which I find really interesting. Also, I’m always trying to insert the female ejaculation into songs, and I knew I wanted to write something about bukkake, so this song sort of twists the idea of bukkake around so that there’s a male in the middle.
You worked very closely with Vice Cooler on the album, in your garage in LA. What was the vibe in the room when you came up with the song?
I mean, Vice would probably know more than me about that because I’m just in such a cloud when I’m putting an album together. It’s such a blur for me. But I can talk about the video, which a big one for me. I worked with two other directors, A.L. Steiner and Lex Vaughn, to put together an all female idenfitied cast and crew of, maybe, 40 people, took them out in the desert and just really went for it. We all just came together to make this video and it felt easy and really powerful to include sex workers and sex performers, and other musicians and visual artists in it. [The video is too spicy for YouTube, but you can find it on Vimeo]
"Hanging Titties" (2026)
BEST FIT: This is the opening track from No Lube So Rude. What is it about this song that you wanted to highlight here?
PEACHES: Well, you know, coming into my new postmenopausal era of, again, not giving a crap more, I’m just now understanding the power of who I can be. So, if I have hanging titties and you’re looking at them and I’m more cunt that you, so be it. And if I can convert you to gay, so be it. It’s a song that looks at all the things that are going on and not just laugh at them but also really dig into them, so you get lines like “Technocrats need to eat a jockstrap.”
There are just so many things going on and we need to make sure that we stay aligned with and are being true to ourselves. I feel like the song has a more of an element of campiness, but it also has a more dance-y, exciting production that I'm into. This is a new era for me in that sense. I wanted it to slap, and be big and campy and fun, and have meaning at the same time.
The song is obviously partly a commentary on getting older, but ageism is something you’ve been facing down from the early days, right?
Yeah, even with The Teaches of Peaches they were calling me grandma. But I think I feel like I'm using getting older to my power, and I don’t think I’m the only one. I feel like there's more representation for older women, and I'm going to lean into it.
I saw you showing love to Shirley Manson on Instagram recently when she was commenting on how old she felt. You wrote something about her always being young and powerful, and it was really lovely to see.
Yeah, and I didn’t mean ‘young’ in terms of looks, because I don’t care if she looks young or old, she just looks fantastic. And I think she doesn’t give herself enough credit. She’s always so humble about her place and who she is, and how much she means to people.
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