Life’s a Peach

TikTok has become the new Myspace, no cap. No, you can’t rank your top eight friends and Tom is nowhere to be seen. The similarity comes in the way the platform serves as a springboard for countless musicians eager to launch their career. One of these musicians is Australian TikToker turned pop singer Peach PRC, who’s the latest to make the leap from social media to the mainstream charts.

Peach began using TikTok in the same way most of us do, sharing silly videos among friends, and before long, a following grew. While she could have continued solely using TikTok for fun, she wasn’t going to miss her chance to be heard. “I had to find a sneaky way to weave my music into my videos,” Peach says. “‘Blondes’ was the first song I dropped on TikTok and I was talking about a tattoo I’d gotten for the song. People were asking about the tattoo and I explained that it’s actually for a song I wrote about this girl who had a boyfriend. I thought that if I put the song out, she would leave him. But she didn’t.”

Although Peach was unsuccessful in winning over the girl, she decided to pay homage to her song “Blondes” with a commemorative tattoo. She began getting tattoos for her songs and this has become an honored tradition she’s continued for each single she’s created. “In my song ‘Blondes,’ the chorus goes, ‘Call your boyfriend,’ and it’s implied she would break up with him,” Peach says. “At the time, she and I had gotten together, but she had a boyfriend, so I wrote that song. Then I got a tattoo of a girl on the phone and she’s saying, ‘I prefer blondes,’ which is a line from the song.”

Despite her growing TikTok fame, Peach continued to use music to address individuals in her personal life. Next up was her ex-boyfriend and instead of trying to woo him, she used cleverly constructed lyrics to send him a very clear and concise message—“Fuck off, stop calling me, Josh.” “My ex Josh was the inspiration and yes, Josh is his real name,” Peach says of her 2021 single “Josh.” “I wasn’t signed when I wrote that song and when I put it on my TikTok, that’s where everything took off. We were on and off for, like, 10 years and it was a really messy breakup.

“At first, he was really upset about the song, we had a bit of a fight about it and then didn’t speak for a while,” she continues. “He nearly lost his job because of the line about money rolled up his nose, but he was all good. We eventually talked about it and it ended up making us closer as friends. Now it’s just a funny joke between the two of us.”

“Josh” was Peach’s first song to chart and it led the way towards her signing a recording contract with a major label. The track has fundamentally helped to define her sound and style as a pop singer. It’s also a song she sees in a very different light now that she’s come out as a lesbian.

“Looking back on a lot of the love songs I would write, I wasn’t really sad about the boy,” Peach says. “I was sad because I felt like something was wrong with me. Even my song ‘Heavy’ was about feeling sad that I was unlovable. With Josh, I wasn’t sad that he dumped me, I was just angry he was contacting me. I guess a lot of my love songs and breakup songs make a lot more sense now.”

Peach had previously identified as bisexual and she decided to break the news to her followers on her private TikTok account. However, considering her private TikTok account has over 200,000 followers, the news wasn’t a secret for long. “It’s something I’ve always kind of known, but I’d been going back and forth on whether to fully embrace and admit it to people,” Peach says. “I went on that account and told people, which made it easier because everyone’s super supportive. I was like, ‘Fuck it, let’s just go on the main account and tell everyone.’ I didn’t realize it would be such a big thing, but I’m really happy and I feel really accepted.”

Although her coming out wasn’t planned, it somehow perfectly coincides with the release of her newest song, “God is a Freak.” The inspiration for this single initially came from videos Peach made for her TikTok, where she poked fun at God watching everything we do and other contradictions found in Christianity. Now, her lyrics take on a new meaning for both Peach and her fans in the LGBTQ+ community. “I wrote this song the night before, recorded it and put it on TikTok that day,” Peach says. “I didn’t think about anything I was doing. The song is about the absurdities of the concept of God and his priorities—it never really made sense to me. It was meant to be a bit tongue-and-cheek, but it’s turned out to mean a lot to a lot of people.”

“God is a Freak” is just a taste of what Peach has in store for us. She’s won over audiences with her authenticity and has continued to get more real with her fans as time goes on. She’s an artist who wears her heart on her sleeve, tells it like it is, and will continue to give her fans what they come to her for. “I’m hoping to do an album next,” Peach says. “I have so many songs that I’ve recorded and demos ready to go. Now I’m just narrowing which songs we’re going to put out and when. But at this point, I just put things on TikTok and don’t think about it.”

Peach PRC and her flourishing career are proof TikTok can turn an ordinary person into a full-fledged popstar. Sure, you need to have the talent, the hustle and the social media wherewithal to pull it off. But with those skills and TikTok acting as the wind behind your sails, the impossible can become possible.