Indeed, No Lube So Rude, Peaches’ first new album in ten years, is a work of emotional and sonic alchemy, one that transforms all the frustration and abrasion of modern life into joy and transcendence. Recorded with producer The Squirt Deluxe, the collection explores identity, sexuality, and bodily autonomy through a deliberately provocative lens, balancing the poetic and the profane in equal measure as it challenges prevailing notions of age, desire, and intimacy. Peaches’ lyrics are bawdy and explicit here, laced with biting sarcasm and clever wordplay, but they’re also surprisingly vulnerable, offering up a candid look in the mirror from a post-menopausal queer icon reckoning with a society that’s come to expect silence, if not outright erasure. The result is a brash, unapologetic blend of electronic, dance, punk, industrial, and pop music that refuses to surrender its singular sense of self, an intoxicating, exhilarating invitation to cut loose, speak up, and feel good in your own skin.
“I want people to understand that they can still have a voice no matter who they are or what the world says about them,” Peaches explains. “Now more than ever, there are so many forces that just want you to give up and be quiet. If this album can help you resist that, then that’s what it’s for.”
Born Merrill Nisker, Peaches first catapulted to international stardom with her 2000 debut, The Teaches of Peaches, which introduced the world to her sexually transgressive, fiercely assertive, and utterly captivating stage persona. The album’s ubiquitous lead single “Fuck the Pain Away” became a bonafide smash and a genuine pop culture phenomenon. Them Magazine praised Peaches saying “20 years after The Teaches of Peaches, the world is still catching up with the artist’s brash, irreverent, and sexually self-assured life philosophy.” In the years that followed, Peaches would go on to release five more trailblazing albums – prompting the The New York Times to dub her a “heroine” and Uncut to rave that she brings together “high art, low humour and deluxe filth [in] a hugely seductive combination” – and collaborate with everyone from Iggy Pop and Daft Punk to Christina Aguilera and R.E.M., to Kim Gordon and Yoko Ono. Her music has been honored with the prestigious Polaris Heritage Prize, featured in cultural watermarks like Lost In Translation, The Handmaid’s Tale, South Park, and Broad City, and studied at universities around the world...