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  • The Recommender: Peaches

The Recommender: Peaches

The musician, performance artist and punk provocateur shares her latest (counter-)cultural discoveries

Dec 12, 2025

Photo: The Squirt Deluxe

The sexually transgressive Canadian trailblazer is back with a new album – her first in more than a decade – and world tour and she's not pulling any punches. Its singles so far? Not In Your Mouth None Of Your Business and Fuck Your Face. Ah, we have missed the teaches of Peaches. After emerging from the Toronto underground scene in the 1990s, Peaches (real name Merrill Nisker) moved to Berlin in 2000 and pioneered the electroclash sound that’s back in the charts today via Charli XCX and Lady Gaga. Also a producer, director and performance artist, Peaches has always made music that reflects the times, and her new album No Lube So Rude (out on Kill Rock Stars on 20 February) explores themes of identity, sexuality, feminism and bodily autonomy from the point of view of a "post-menopausal queer icon". Brilliant.

ZINE

SPAT!mag

SPAT!mag is a new zine designed to reactivate physical forms of community and sharing culture, named after Spätis – late-night German delis where people casually gather and drink cheap beer. You can only get the zine by passing it on hand to hand. It's worth coming all the way to Berlin just to get your hands on one – it serves to connect the underground back to its punk form, building scenes in real life and finding new nightlife spaces to meet and flourish in. Get offline and into the night!

A Year Without Summer. Photo: Mayra Wallraff

PERFORMANCE

Florentina Holzinger: A Year Without Summer

An ensemble of all-female-identifying performers in its rawest form on stage. Reimagining high camp, high art, high danger in a totally entertaining and uncompromising performance art extravaganza. Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger's elaborate, fantastical and hyper-real shows combine dance, stunt work, circus, body art and live sex acts that question how female bodies are sexualised in contemporary culture. Her latest work is a powerful and emotional punch dealing with health, age, identity, destruction, robotics and bioengineering. I don’t want to tell you too much – I want you to be there and experience it!

Phoebe Lunny and Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez of Lambrini Girls at Glastonbury festival, June 2024. Photo: Jim Dyson / Getty

MUSIC

Lambrini Girls

If you are not radicalised after seeing this British band’s electric activation of a show then you are dead inside! Punk energy that doesn’t quit. The audience is completely enthralled and active in their powerful, political solidarity together. Selin and Phoebe’s chants call for trans rights, and for fighting misogyny, the wealth gap and racism. Phoebe incites circle pits, crowd surfing and moshing. What they're doing is just so important and so entertaining and so good for humanity, but also for the punks, to have that representation. Fantastic.

Penis Decanter from thewinesavant.com

DESIGN

Dickanter

A lot of new design objects are not shying away from using body parts as beautiful functional art pieces. My new favourite is the dickanter. Extremely helpful in letting your wine breathe while bringing some cheekiness to the process.

The interior of Soho Theatre Walthamstow. Photo: David Levene

VENUE

Soho Theatre Walthamstow, London

It's so important right now, with so many places closing down, that there are places for people – especially the queer community – to express themselves, like Soho theatre and the Divine in Hackney. I was really surprised the first time I went to the new Soho theatre in east London. I was like: where am I going, is this the countryside? But people will travel further out for great culture; this is what we have to do now. And what they've done with the space is amazing – it's a great vibe and it's independent.

The Recommender is supposed to comprise five choices and not things that the cultural figure choosing them is personally involved in, but as it’s Peaches, and as this film that she’s recommending took more than a decade to create, we’re letting her slip it in:

Peaches and Marie Losier from the film Peaches Goes Bananas

FILM

Peaches Goes Bananas

Yes, this is a documentary about me, but the special part is how this film was made, and all the love and creativity that was put into this extraordinary piece of art. Marie Losier films with a 16mm Bolex camera and only uses sound from an external source. Every film strip is edited by hand, and the sound and image are creatively reconstructed by Marie's unique perspective. She has made other incredible documentaries, including the acclaimed The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye. This film was made over a period of 17 years and captures a very intimate look at me on and off stage.

Interview by Kate Hutchinson

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