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February is the worst month in Sydney, without a shadow of a doubt. Humidity nudging three figures, 30-degree days punctuated by drenching showers, no relieving southerly in sight. For a month, the city swelters, fighting the rising mould, awaiting the first hint of autumn.
It’s a classic February day when I meet Peach PRC in Sydney’s Surry Hills. The rain has been sheeting down all afternoon, but the mercury has refused to dip below 30. Mercifully, the air-conditioning is cranked high in the Pole Athletica pole dancing studio.
Peach – born Shaylee Curnow – is finishing a video interview in a busy day of promotion for her long-awaited debut album, Porcelain. Watchers hang on the stairs as Peach athletically twists around the brass pole, limbs outstretched. It’s an impressive display, and there are murmurs of admiration as she leaps up and walks in the air around the pole, without slipping, looking weightless.
The host walks her through a few more shots, and Curnow is more than happy to keep spinning, a calm smile on her face. She’s not just here for an interesting video location: having worked as a pole dancer in clubs years ago, she trains here regularly, and pole dancing will feature in her coming shows. Today serves as a quick rehearsal before the album tour begins this month.
The interview wraps up, and Curnow ducks to the side for a few bites of a sandwich and a swig of water before we head to a smaller, quieter studio, where the pumping music from upstairs won’t drown us out.
“I love doing the pole on stage, it’s a nice break from the performance,” she explains, rearranging herself on the ottoman we’ve dragged in. “It feels more intuitive and more in my body and a lot of it is just freestyle. I come and train here so I can get stronger, but when I do it on stage I just kind of make it up, depending on how I feel and how the crowd is. And I love having a break from being like, ‘I need to be on pitch.’ ”
How can she sing, straight after the intense core-muscle workout that is pole dancing? Curnow laughs. “It usually takes me about half the song to catch my breath again,” she says. “I’m usually [mimes gasping for breath] for the whole first half of the song, but whatever. It’s a fun vibe. People are there to see the show and rock out and have fun, they don’t care if I’m catching my breath.”
The last time the Adelaide-born, Sydney-based pop star and I met was in early 2023 for an interview in this masthead before the release of her debut EP Manic Dream Pixie. It arrived after a few years of consistently high-performing singles: the viral Josh, the laugh-out-loud God Is A Freak (“Why’s he watching me getting railed on the couch/Staying pure for a wedding?/He’s got f---ed up priorities”), and Forever Drunk, which landed in Triple J’s Hottest 100. The EP, a collection of sugary, nostalgic pop cuts, made No.1 on the ARIA Australian Albums chart.
It was an overwhelming moment for Curnow, who had longed for pop stardom through a troubled childhood. She’s spoken candidly about it over the years: she grew up in a neglectful household with a “pretty abusive” stepfather, later dropping out of high school and getting kicked out of her biological father’s house when he found out she was working as a stripper.
The draw of pop’s glittery escapism was obvious, and Curnow continued to write and upload songs in those unstable years – one of which caught the ear of a producer, who flew her to Los Angeles to record Blondes. The song went viral, changing Curnow’s life.
The Manic Dream Pixie era was defined by a clear aesthetic: bubblegum pink, fairy wings, flower crowns. For a long time Curnow’s hair was either platinum blonde or bright pink, matching everything in her house at the time.
But there’s no pink to be seen today: Curnow is dressed in a simple brown shirt and shorts, her hair is a light brunette, and small green petals and paint are carefully arranged on her face. Pink petals are scattered on the cover of Porcelain, but the change in aesthetic is stark and deliberate.
“It was so authentic to me and so genuine, and I really leaned into it because I loved it,” Curnow says about letting go of the pink. “But after a while, when it became like, ‘OK, she’s the pink guy’... it felt like a product and it felt like a costume and something I was putting on. People always change and grow and whether I was doing music or not, I would have grown out of that.”
Curnow goes into more depth about it in a statement accompanying the album, taken from her personal journal: “I don’t feel like I have that same freedom to find myself again, or feel like I have the permission to explore. I feel like I need to keep a familiar look, so people can identify me and continue engaging with my art… I don’t know the way forward.”
She elaborates: “It’s hard to [leave it behind] when everyone’s attached to something. It’s scary to be like, ‘I don’t actually know what I have now to give you instead, I dunno who I am right now.’ I don’t like to force an identity for the sake of selling, so I’m just having to show up unfinished and be like, ‘I don’t know.’ ”
When we spoke in 2023, Curnow was constantly contemplating where Peach PRC ended and Shaylee Curnow began. No longer.
“I’m trying to stop separating the two because they’ve always been the same person … and it’s all coming from the same place,” she says. “I think separating the two is what made me feel a bit disconnected, like, ‘Oh, this is a costume I put on and this is a product I sell and then I have my real life.’ But really, my real life is so involved in my art and I was always creating, I’m always writing, I’m always looking for things for Peach, and so I am trying to blend the two now.”
Curnow moved out of her “Barbie apartment” while touring for Manic Dream Pixie, and intended to spend a year bouncing through Airbnbs before settling on a place to buy. It didn’t go to plan. “It turns out I need a bit more stability and I didn’t do too well with that,” Curnow laughs.
Desperate to get away from grey surroundings, she found herself spending more time in bushland. Curnow hadn’t grown up religious or spiritual, but nature afforded her a sense of something bigger than herself, a solid grounding with literal roots. “I’ve never had anything bigger than myself to ask for guidance or to pray to or anything like that,” she says. “Nature is something that everyone has access to, and it’s for everyone. It’s a language we all speak. Being able to go out with the trees and be like, ‘Well, I’m allowed to ask this tree for guidance.’ No rules, it’s just nature.”
She pauses before bursting into laughter and throwing up her hands. “I don’t know if that made a whole lot of sense,” she says.
There are several references to God and praying on Porcelain, and the lure of a higher power runs through tracks such as Piper and Eucalyptus. Previously, Curnow’s only dalliance with the person upstairs had been on the aforementioned God Is A Freak; clearly, a shift has taken place.
“In God Is A Freak, I was like, ‘Who is this guy? He’s running everything and being weird about it. Leave me alone,’ ” she says. “Now I’ve had a bit more time to sit with it, and it’s less anger of rebellion against religion and it’s more like, ‘Well what is spirituality to me and what can it do for me?’
“I do believe that everybody should have some sort of spirituality, whatever that means for them. Sometimes that is Christianity and sometimes it’s the trees. When I did God Is A Freak, I believed that not everybody needed that, and I was maybe above that. I’ve come to realise I need it just as much as I need food and water. It’s something that everybody needs to have in some way. So I chose the fairies and the plants.”
The fairies may have largely disappeared from the Peach PRC aesthetic, but they were more present than ever in Porcelain’s creation (there’s even a song on the record called Shirley Barber, after the beloved fairy-story author). Curnow’s fairies aren’t the prim and waif-like Disney fairies, but the ancient and powerful “good folk” or “fae” of Scottish and Irish folklore. They’ve always been “a huge part of everything I do,” Curnow explains.
“It’s spiritual to me, it’s a lot more tied to folklore and the traditional way the Scottish and Irish would see fairies,” Curnow says. “And I’ve done so much research into it because I find it so fascinating and I think it’s really beautiful. I can use it the same way people use Christianity. I can pray to the fairies, I can ask for guidance and it does the same thing for me mentally. So that’s where I connect with them.”
Writing the album, Curnow often headed into bushland armed with her fairy oracle cards, asking for guidance on colour palettes or aesthetics or other topics to channel her energy. “I’m trying not to sound insane,” Curnow laughs again.
Assembled with a crack team of producers such as Konstantin Kersting (Tones and I), Larzz Principato (Dua Lipa, Tate McRae), and Harry Charles (King Princess, Renee Rapp), Porcelain bears the classic Peach PRC trademarks: glittering pop tracks with supercharged choruses and finely sharpened hooks. There’s MUNA-level queer yearning on tracks like Back To You and Celebrity Crush, while she opens up about the sometimes-fun, sometimes-very-not-fun reality of working in strip clubs on Miss Erotica and The Palace.
In the past, Curnow would have run into a new release with reams of TikTok videos and social posts (she has nearly 2.5 million followers on TikTok and Instagram). Social media had been a huge part of Curnow’s swift rise to fame, but she’s retreated over the past year or so. She’s still there, sometimes singing along to her PlantWave (which claims to turn plant electrical signals into sound), but the stream of consciousness vlogs and skits are mostly gone.
“I posted so much because I was genuinely a bit lonely and I had so much to say and no one to say it to,” Curnow says, with a rueful smile. “That sounds really sad, but I guess it probably was a little bit. It gave me community and it gave me a lot of purpose and fulfillment. I was drawn to do it more and I felt like there were no stakes. It was like, ‘Who gives a f--- If I say something wrong? Who the hell am I? It’s whatever.’
“But then when there were higher stakes, it became like, ‘Now you have to post to promote this and you have to do this’... I found it really difficult and I felt like I was putting on my costume and going ‘Here, buy this thing.’ I hated it.
“Recently, I’ve decided that I actually just don’t care and I don’t care if my label care. I just want to create my art and I don’t want it to actually have anything to do with promotion … I don’t want it to be, ‘And also stream my song and pre-save this!’... I just want to make the thing.”
Our interview winds up just as the rain starts pelting down again outside, a deafening din on the old building’s roof. Curnow takes more bites of that sandwich before she trains for a few more hours, spinning weightless.
Peach PRC’s Porcelain is out on April 3. Her national tour includes Melbourne’s Palace Foreshore on March 12, Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion on March 15, and Brisbane’s South Bank Forecourt on March 19.
