When I call Peach PRC, she’s sitting on a grey sofa at her home in Sydney with her dog Marbles. Illuminated by a fluorescent fuchsia neon light, she’s wearing head-to-toe bubblegum pink frills, with rhinestones and bows in her wavy platinum blonde hair. She’s gearing up for the world to hear her now-released latest single, “Perfect For You” — the first track from her upcoming Manic Dream Pixie EP — that went viral on TikTok for its interpolation of Paris Hilton’s 2006 classic, “Stars Are Blind”.
“It’s about my girlfriend,” Peach says of the song. “On our first date, we were listening to music in the park and sharing a headphone each, and we were just bonding over the fact we both love early 00s pop. She loved that song by Paris and so did I, so I wrote this song, not thinking it was ever going to come out.” Buried in the layers of vocals is the sound of her now-girlfriend ad-lib singing that famed chorus on their adorable first meeting.
Peach’s label loved the track, as did Paris, who approved the homage (and even duetted one of Peach’s TikToks). “Paris followed me on TikTok!” she tells us. “I was with my girlfriend, and we were scrolling, and I saw she came up in my mutuals, and I was like, ‘what the hell?’ and then I clicked on her page and she’d duetted my song. That was crazy. She’s been really sweet about the whole thing. ‘Stars Are Blind’ is such an iconic, timeless and fun pop song. It’s easy to listen and sing along to, and it’s nostalgic. That’s what pop should be.”
The “lesbian singer doing lesbian singing” is a sensation on TikTok, with over two million followers and devotees of her hazy Y2K-pilled tracks, whose lyrics read like private thoughts you’d only share with your closest friends. While “Perfect for You” — which the singer, who has synaesthesia, meaning she sees colours when she performs, describes as an ultra-violet colour — has an edge to its lyrics about falling for your friend’s crush, it is far less tendentious than her previous tracks. “Josh”, for example, is a middle finger anthem to an ex that sees her belt, “fuck off, stop calling me, Josh!”.
Her most famous track, though, is “God Is a Freak”, a blasphemy bop that went viral for calling out the Christian deity for seemingly obsessing over sex rather than real-world problems (“why’s he watching me getting railed on the couch or staying pure for a wedding? He’s got fucked up priorities” she sings over rock pop guitars). I ask if Manic Dream Pixie is generally similar in tone to “Perfect for You” or more in line with her previous tracks. “The EP has some elements of the ‘Forever Drunk’ vibe. There’s some really deep stuff on there. There’s also just some really fun dance pop. It’s a nice spectrum of me.”
Peach started her music career while working as a stripper. “Peach Porcelain was my stage name,” she shares. “I chose it because it sounded pink and girly and it reminded me of Princess Peach from Mario Brothers, even though I don’t really play it. She was blonde and wore pink and I was like, that’s me!” Her style, she says, has stayed almost exactly the same since her stripping days and is something she has always known; crediting the illustrated Shirley Barber fairy books she read as a child, as well as her mum, as inspiration. “My mum is also all pink,” she continues. “She has pink hair, pink clothes, a pink house — everything. So, it’s something I’ve just always loved. Maybe it’s genetic!” Peach shortened Porcelain to PRC when she joined TikTok, but decided to keep it as an artist name in order to preserve some privacy. “My songs ‘Blondes’ and ‘Colourblind’ were out while I was still stripping, so I kept it in order to not give my actual name away.”
She explains that being a fan of The 1975 played a major role in her lyricism. “They really inspired my storytelling and just the cadence of how I sing. I don’t even consciously think about it anymore; I’ve been such a big fan of them for so long that it’s embedded in my writing style now.” Y2K pop-rock like All American Rejects, Busted and the Wheatus song “Teenage Dirtbag” (which she covered last year for Spotify) were similarly influential, as well as early 2010s popstars like Katy Perry and Kesha.
Last year Peach worked with Bonnie McKee, the singer-songwriter legend behind some of those artists’ biggest hits. “I used to dance to Bonnie’s music when I was a stripper! Her song ‘American Girl’ was one of my stage songs. She’s been such a legend to me for so long — to actually work with her on my own music was surreal.”
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It’s seems fitting that Peach would sample Paris Hilton, considering both toe the line between artifice and reality in their work. The hotel heiress has spent years crafting a bimbo party girl persona for her public appearances, yet can delve into genuine yet controlled moments of rawness that have made her feel slightly less out of reach. Peach, on the other hand, brings a heavily aestheticised look to sad bops that are devastating in their brutal honesty. On TikTok, too, both on her main account and an alt, @ritalinprc, she has been very open about her mental health, previous addiction issues and her body image; as well as self-care techniques and her latest crafts and hobbies. “If it’s a random thought that’s not that deep, I’ll put it on TikTok, but if it’s something internal that I’m trying to work through and understand… sometimes I’ll put it in a TikTok, but I like to write it into a song too. It feels a bit more private and personal.”
Does crafting a hyper-stylised fantasy around her popstar persona make it easier to be so raw with her music? “Sometimes I need to put things into words by making it clever and sound pretty and turn it into a hit rather than writing all my feelings in a journal. I find that tedious and boring,” she says. “I write sad songs because I’m trying to process something, but I don’t necessarily want it to be a sad ballad, so I speed it up, put it over a fun pop track and turn it into an anthemic pop song.”
Peach’s management are pretty good at letting her take control of her own direction, but her more controversial tracks were released before they even had the chance to veto them. “God Is a Freak”, for example? “I straight up put that out and didn’t tell them anything beforehand, so they kind of had to accept it,” she says. Her no holds barred style of writing has, of course, garnered some criticism — but less than she was expecting. While conservatives and evangelicals have taken umbrage with the words to “God Is a Freak”, a few comments on her TikTok videos have suggested that she is capitalising on trauma or romanticising issues like alcoholism, specifically the song “Forever Drunk” — the one she worked on with Bonnie — that puts a vocoder and glitzy, ethereal track under haunting lyrics about heartbreak so bad you’re struggling to live not inebriated. “I think that if we censor our art, we water down something that could be really impactful,” she reflects. “I don’t want to water down something I’ve truly felt, just because people might think it’s romanticising. My music is for them, but, at the end of the day, I’m writing it for me. They can choose to have it resonate or not.”
By growing her popstar fandom through TikTok, Peach already has a global audience and hopes to meet more of them soon. “They’re all over the place!” she says. “I really want to tour and perform overseas. Hopefully that’s something I can do this year.” She’s set to perform at her first Mardi Gras, a special one since this year it’s tied to World Pride in Sydney — her first since coming out herself. As her following grows even more, does she worry that the backlash could grow with it? “Not really. I’m pretty strong in who I am and what I believe in,” she says. “And I know I have good intentions and I’m a good person. People can say all kinds of things and try to twist my songs into whatever, but I know, and my fans know, what I stand for.”
Click on the sound for “God Is a Freak” on TikTok, and you’ll find many people using it as a soundtrack to open up about their struggles with religion, sexuality and acceptance. Here lies Peach’s ultimate impact. “It was like a relief for them to hear someone so unabashedly be like, ‘this is weird, fuck this guy’. That was really liberating for a lot of people, and that was beautiful. I loved seeing that.” Not only is Peach’s art an outlet for her darkest thoughts, then, but also a healing space for her listeners — almost like group therapy. “When it comes to music, I’ve never really held back my opinions,” she continues. “People will hear that in the EP. It’s definitely nice to have that reassurance and feedback that people are resonating with it, but I was gonna do it anyway.”
Credits
Photography James Tolich
Hair and makeup Peach PRC
All clothes model’s own