Merrill Nisker, professionally known as Peaches, is in what she calls her “backstage booties” at a venue in London’s Kentish Town neighborhood. She’s here to perform “Cuntology 101” with Lambrini Girls, a track she’s remixed for the super-hot group. Her blond and brown hair is shaved with a tuft, the rest bushy and cascading down the back of her neon yellow top. As soon as she sees me, she asks, “Didn’t we do this before?” We did, about 20 years ago, and I’m shocked she remembers at all.
Peaches is adept at disarming people and quietly taking control of her environment. She asks me more questions than I ask her. Where do I go clubbing? What’s on the wall behind me? Do I teach journalism? She frequently deflects the focus back to me, steering the exchange into something almost one-sided, with me doing most of the talking, which I suspect is exactly her intention. At the end of our conversation, I tell her I talked way too much and she added very little. She replies, “I feel like you did all the research. You know what you want to write.”
This gives me somewhat of a carte blanche to say what I want about her, but it’s disappointing, because she’s clearly not boring and I would have loved to have heard more from her. But, at the same time, she doesn’t need to explain anything she does. Why should she? The work speaks for itself.
One of the early creatives to make Berlin her hometown, the Canadian-born Peaches helped shape the city’s open-minded, gritty artistic energy. Her convention-flouting appearance and unapologetic, if sometimes crude, lyrics (I’ve always suspected the peach emoji was based on her) ran directly against societal norms. Years later, those songs endure as anthems for queer and outsider communities.
Peaches is a 360-degree artist, creating not only music but also photo books, installations, immersive exhibitions, stage work, and video. Her projects include the one-woman show Peaches Christ Superstar and the electro-rock opera Peaches Does Herself, alongside turns as a fashion muse for Yves Saint Laurent. Her chant-along songs “Fuck the Pain Away” and “Boys Wanna Be Her” remain fixtures in the zeitgeist through well-placed syncs. She is also the subject of two documentaries: Teaches of Peaches (2024), the anniversary tour and career retrospective directed by Philipp Fussenegger and Judy Landkammer, and Peaches Goes Bananas, an artist portrait by Marie Losier, who has been filming Peaches for nearly two decades, which arrives on digital platforms January 30.
Ten years after her last album, the 59-year-old Peaches returns with a fresh set of undeniable rallying cries on her newest LP, No Lube So Rude. It also includes “Fuck Your Face,” “Fuck How You Want to Fuck,” and “Not in Your Mouth None of Your Business.” The album arrives February 20, the same day she kicks off a North American tour, with $1 from every ticket sold going to support the Trans Justice Funding Project.
“The world needs it,” she says of releasing an album after a decade. “I need it. I need to connect with people on all this. It’s batshit crazy out there.”
It has always felt as though Peaches was light years ahead of the rest of us. She was outspoken about queer issues, sex-positive, body-positive, and an uber-feminist long before any of those positions were fashionable. While the culture may finally be catching up to ideas she’s embodied since the start of her career, Peaches doesn’t see it that way. “In some ways, it’s flipping on the other end,” she says. “Over the years, people sometimes say to me, ‘Is what you do still relevant?’ I would like it to be celebratory relevant instead of fighting-the-fight relevant. But things seem very intensified and now’s the time to get it out there and make sure we’re fighting the good fight.”
While Peaches acknowledges a rollback in progress in some areas, she’s quick to point out the positives. Among them are top pop artists like Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, and Doechii, who are, as she puts it, “outwardly queer and unabashedly singing about being queer. We’ve never seen that happen.” At the same time, she wonders whether queerness risks becoming a trend, and whether she’ll one day be told, “I’m not fashionable as a human being.” She’s also noticed younger listeners discovering her music while her original fans remain steadfast. “I’m excited people my age are going to participate and be a part of the community,” she says. “Having intergenerational conversation and being together is important.”
The genre-blurring that once made her difficult to categorize is now the norm. “Kids are using nu-metal with hyper pop disco,” she says. “There’s no purity, which is great, because that used to be a problem. Now it’s no holds barred.”
“No holds barred” could easily be Peaches’ motto. It underpins everything she does. When I saw her perform live in the 2000s, she was literally climbing the walls of the venue in an impossible costume. It didn’t feel like a concert so much as a scene from a dystopian film, with the crowd displaying a kind of rabid worship toward a single entity. It left an indelible impression on me, but she’s accustomed to that kind of reaction and offers little commentary, asking only, “Which venue was it?”
These days, Peaches wears a distressed leather jacket in her inimitable way—upside down. It belonged to her late sister, whom she lost five years ago. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at 21, Suri Nisker lived to 47. She survived cancer, but her body eventually rejected nourishment and she grew weak. “She just went away,” Peaches says.
She describes working with avant–garde fashion designer Charlie Le Mindu to reconstruct the concept for the costumes, making it something “crazy and fun,” and bringing the spirit of her sister into it.
“My sister would wear this leather jacket that made her feel cool in any situation. It was this form of protection. When he saw my sister’s jacket, he’s like, ‘Let’s put it upside down.’ We built a piece behind it, so now she’ll be in the show.”
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