Peach PRC, aka Sharlee Jade Curnow, Australia’s new pop sweetheart is on her way to take over the world with her sparkling pink fairy universe. The singer, whose artist name is a homage to Nintendo’s Princess Peach, first rose to fame on TikTok, captivating her audience with her quirky persona and her outspoken approach to mental health and queer sexuality, later on introducing them to her talent. In 2023, she released her first EP ‘Manic Dream Pixie’, embarked on her first world tour – with London being one of her many stops – and got nominated for three ARIA Music Awards for her outstanding work. We sat down with Peach over a long-distance Zoom call from her Australian home to find out more about her songwriting beginnings, her love for Pink – which is so much more than just a colour – and her admiration for female pop icons that led her to become one herself.
As Peach has finished her European tour and recently performed at the ARIA Music Awards, there comes a moment to congratulate and compliment her incredible stage presence, which takes her by surprise. “I’ve actually always thought I can’t do this but I’ve got to,”, she says, referring to performing in front of thousands of people, ”But now I’ve come around it.” On this tour, Peach has made so many fond memories – particularly due to fans’ projects where they printed out little messages related to certain songs, handed them out in the lineup and then, during said songs, held up heart-shaped pieces of paper. “I’ve kept a bunch of them, I have them in a box,”, the young artist states with a smile, “I would never know which song it was gonna be or what the messages were gonna say, and it would make me bawl my eyes out every time, how sweet it was and the effort they went through to do that!”
Songwriting, on the other hand, has always come easy to her. “I’ve always loved writing,”, Peach continues. “The first time I wrote a song, I was, I think, eight. Looking back at the lyrics now, it sounded really sad, but I don’t think I really had any aims with it. I had no real substance to anything I was saying, it was assumption-based. But I was talking about the moonlight falling into my eyes and not being able to find a reason to cry anymore. It was very intense! I probably didn’t even know what I was talking about,”, she shakes her head at the thought of her younger self. Her songwriting process nowadays oftentimes begins with a text, yet it is always personal. “I just start writing out a story or sometimes a poem that isn’t in any structure of a song, and then I’ll take bits and pieces from that and try to make them rhyme and put them over a melody. I find it harder to start with a melody and add words to that,”, the singer explains truthfully and carries on, “I would love to be able to write things that aren’t about me for once, I would love to put myself in someone else’s shoes, but I find it really difficult. I find it the easiest to write from something I’ve experienced, even if it’s embellished a little bit”. Previously, Peach had admitted that she used to be a fan of The 1975 and their songwriting, so there is the question of how she might’ve adapted some of their style, or if there is a certain song of hers that they inspired. “I feel like if I said yes, I would get dragged,”, she laughs, “I know some of my people would be like, “Don’t compare yourself to that”, but they did inspire me to write poetically. My songs are, you know, not THAT poetic. But I think they have a really beautiful way of combining matter-of-fact statements with very visual poetic like euphemisms, which I love”. She goes on to confess that some of her unreleased songs that might be on TikTok are similar to theirs and that her single ‘Symptomatic’ was inspired by “their guitars and their style, but not so much their lyrics”.
Peach’s obsession with the colour Pink and “all the OG pop girls”, is also something she grew up with. “I’ve always loved Britney! As I got a bit older, I also liked Kesha, Katy Perry and Carly Rae Jepsen, all those kind of pop stars. They really inspired me. Still!”, she exclaims in admiration when being asked what made her want to become a pop star too. Regarding the colour pink, her mother is the exact same, as she describes that everything they had in the house she grew up in was pink. “You would think it would make me not want to be that way as well, but it just kind of happened that way,”, she laughs, “For years, I would still really like the colour, but I had more variety. And then it got to a point where I was like, “Pink is my favourite”, so why should I bother with anything else? I enjoy it, it makes me happy, so I stick with this one colour”. The colour itself doesn’t only make Peach happy, to her, it also represents girlhood and embracing femininity, “in a stereotypical way that I think a lot of us learn to reject to be cool because it was seen as weak”. “But I’m not just a stereotype”, she proceeds, “I like sports, I like cars, and I feel like I’ve tried to embrace that as a good thing”.
As Peach started off her career by becoming a well-known social media persona, mainly on TikTok, who is very vocal about mental health issues and sharing her own struggles, has it become a subject that she prefers to discuss in her songwriting instead of social media content more often these days? “Good question,”, Peach takes a moment to answer, “I think it’s more in my songwriting now than it is on TikTok. I’ve grown up a lot on TikTok, I’ve been on there for almost four years. When I started, I was in a very bad place, I was going through a lot. I think now that I’ve recovered a lot, I don’t really have a lot of mental health stuff to talk about anymore. Now I can process. And put it in my music instead.”
Furthermore, since coming out as a lesbian singer online, Peach feels like she has come into her audience and found her niche. “I now have more of an understanding of who my audience is and who the people are that are listening to my music. I think it’s a lot of queer and neurodivergent people, and that’s perfect for me,”, she giggles, “Now I can stop trying to appeal to something that I don’t even know if that makes any sense”. Her new song ‘Like A Girl Does’, and its music video perfectly encapsulate her brand and what the Australian musician stands for. “I really wanted the music video to be very 2010s inspired, like Ariana Grande’s ‘Break Free’, back when music videos were such a big thing for others and they were such high budget, huge productions. I really want to bring that back as I feel like we’ve lost the art of music videos a little bit”, she clarifies.
Wanting to create something unique and camp, Peach and her team made “like a big vibrator spaceship. A lot of people think it’s a uterus, either one works“. “And everyone talks about the green screen, but it was meant to look a little bit tacky, a little bit bad. Like, you know that it’s all pretend and just silly. It’s not that serious. Because the song doesn’t take itself that seriously, I didn’t want the video to either.”
However, Peach declares she is not entering a new space era, yet keeps us excited for her next release: “I think the space theme was just a one-time thing. I wanted to get it out of my system, to go as camp and pop as possible, because I think what I’m working on next is a little bit more stripped back. One last hurrah and just go crazy with it. And then get a bit more serious.”
For 2024, Peach doesn’t really have any resolutions but informs us that she does make a mood board every year, “or every couple of years” if she forgets. “I put a bunch of things on there that I want to achieve career-wise, and I just make them as long as possible. I want to travel to more cities and perform in more places, and bigger venues, and I want to take it as far as I can,”, she smiles into the camera one last time, and we are more than convinced that 2024 will be another successful year for our notably likeable fairy pop queen.
Written by Vicky Madzak // photography by Jess Gleeson
GEM Magazine 