The Prolapse of Peaches

The mutant pop pioneer on her new record, body freedom, and the blossoming landscape of queer culture.

Published on March 3, 2026

by Khagan Aslanov

It’s safe to assume that Peaches has been hearing the words ‘welcome back’ a lot lately. After all, the iconic electroclash artist’s latest, the frenetically electric No Lube So Rude, comes on the heels of a cool decade-long wait. Yet it’s important to note that, recorded output aside, Peaches never really left.

Beyond the deeply-felt scope of aesthetic and thematic influence that the artist otherwise known as Merrill Nisker has carved both into the pop canon and our collective sociology, Peaches has been tirelessly working on other projects this entire time — she’s done performance art, arranged music for dance troupes, and even dipped their feet into opera.

“There’s been a lot going on,” Nisker tells RANGE the day before her new album drops. “I toured Rub for three years. I continue to do Peaches Christ Superstar, my one-person show. I’ve done collaborations with opera and ballet in Stuttgart, where I played the lead role in Seven Deadly Sins. Then there are art installations, huge animatronic, sculpture and video solo shows, centered around the emancipation of the double masturbators, and how sick they are of humans, and how sex toys can get together and create their own world, rather than being used up. Then there’s my stage show recreations, which I can’t sustainably do on tour.”

One might think a new album and tour would be the last thing on the mind of someone with such a replete creative life. Yet, here Peaches sits, a vivid composite of Debbie Harry, Divine and Tom from Finland, an inexhaustible innovator, and historically one of the most important artists in pop, queer, and non-binary spaces. Her return to mainstream music circles seems particularly needed right now, with the world and pop landscape afire, as the rights of immigrants, women, POCs and the LGBTQIA2S+ community are being encroached on, and as the progress that the uncompromising voice of Peaches has helped forge is actively being peeled back.

“The world is a crazy place. I couldn’t sit still, and not say my piece, and not bring my support,” she puts simply.

It might seem odd to a casual listener, who’s used to hearing Peaches’ music in clubs, or who have gone to shows to experience their singular phantasmagorical curation, that this music carries such a crucial political torch. But what was being built underneath these kitschy, grotesque and intensely danceable songs was a bulwark against conservative tyranny, a vitally safe space for the queer, the fluid, and the strange.

“To me, in a larger sense, it’s about humanity, and people being able to be what they need to be, and no one having authority over your body. It seems so simple, and not political at all. It’s the humanity that’s being ripped apart. People say I’m political, but I’m just reacting to the patriarchal set-up that drives these restrictions. It’s human nature to want rights, to want equal pay, to want people to be able to move freely in their own country, to feel free to be in the body that they are in,” Nisker explains.

Beyond the writing and performing of the music at hand, Peaches, as she’s always done, serves as the creative director for the accompanying press releases and tour for No Lube So Rude, and the distorted technicolour imagery that’s been circulating is slathered in their patented visual touch. Mangled, bruised and heart-stoppingly beautiful, it’s a reflection on our bodies as they go through natural phases of ageing, dysmorphia and dismantling, and all the wonderfully gross lumps, growths and discharges that we collect through time.

“The theme is Prolapse!” Nisker declares. “The parts that are coming out. The parts that stick out. The parts that aren’t talked about that are natural parts of your body.”

The outfits and set pieces for the tour have been made using costumes bought at an opera sale in Berlin, and in order to make them match the peculiar and biological themes of the album, Nisker brought in an old ally, Charlie Le Mindu. The superstar hair and fashion designer who pioneered haute coiffure and has himself created massive art installations made of hair, is back at the helm. Le Mindu has collaborated with Peaches for years, and the two seem completely attuned to each other’s visionary kinks.

“We brought the costumes to Charlie, and said ‘use these materials!’ Opera uses great materials, you know. And you can use the crinoline and the wiring and the structure in interesting ways. Things were sustainably built that way.”

Though femme-driven and queer spaces have suffered from conservative pushback over the past few years, the creative aspects of their respective artistic fields are perpetually ascending, and Peaches is excited to tour and dive headfirst into the playground and landscape that she has been helping shape for so many years. What she has spent decades working on, as an invariable act of activism, is now a spectacular burgeoning scene, rich in talent that’s producing some of the most enthralling and engaging music around.

“I’m so excited about it all coming into the conversation. I love it! There is non-binary and queer music being made that’s so exciting, there’s incredible rap made by women. There is so much incredible, really powerful and unapologetic work that didn’t exist before, or existed as an anomaly,” Nisker says.

This is the crux of how pleasurable it is to speak to Peaches. For someone who has spent so long crafting their own vision in the face of adversity, and for someone who has relentlessly protected a fluid living against opposing political forces, she seems profoundly unjaded about the love of making art, and continuing to carry an open dialogue about needful things. Themes of body decay aside, in that sense alone, Peaches is as youthful and exuberant as ever.

As our conversation circles back to the central theme of Prolapse, and I callously ask how playing shows night after night, while handing every part of herself over to an audience feels on a middle-aged body, Nisker just chuckles: “Adrenaline is a very powerful drug.”