She keeps explicitness available as a mode of thought: stubbornly bodily, stubbornly unsanitised, allergic to the polite euphemisms that let power talk about sex while pretending it isn’t. Caught actively amidst an atmosphere that keeps trying to legislate bodies into silence or non-existence, her vulgarity feels like refusal as Peaches always has. The problem with No Lube So Rude is not that it is obscene, or even occasionally unpleasant. It is that it too often confuses provocation with repetition, and insistence with momentum. The scandal, here, is how quickly its transgressions become familiar.
Sonically, the album leans into rave functionalism: persistent 4/4, electroclash snap, industrial edge; the greased-up pipeline for which Peaches is known and loved. Yet the opening stretch arrives with a curious sameness, as if several tracks share one emotional temperature and one production palette. Peaches’ talent for making liberation abrasive, specific, humiliatingly corporeal feels resultantly sanitised as the album sets it course, as it continually strikes the same chord.
“Fuck How You Wanna Fuck” finally introduces actual grit to the set, its later rock 180 roughening the record’s surface. Even so, the talk-rap detours derail any menace. The cadence is playground, the rhymes silly ("eating oystahs / feeling bourgeois / tra-la-la-la") and the first instance of Peaches still having teeth steadily deflates.
The title track fares better because it commits. As ravey electroclash, it thrives on reduction: the hook becomes a physical chant, an “Immigrant Song”–esque holler of ‘lube’ that turns a gag into something genuinely noddable. Its stupidity has a purpose. It functions the way the best Peaches songs have always functioned: the body persuaded first, the brain catching up later.
“Grip” is the album’s strongest argument for itself. Angular bass and funk guitar give the track a taut, wired musculature; the groove has shape, the dynamics breathe, functions that are scant found elsewhere on the record. Peaches still drops the occasional line that curdles into app-speak ("ass wide / swipe right / all night") but the production outruns the cheapness. The horns arrive late, a welcome palette cleanser, proffering a more sonically vibrant dimension to a record that can otherwise feel grey amidst its wan, recession-pop synth colouration.
At the bottom of the pile curdles “Panna Cotta Delight”, dull and slightly heinous. Its refrain overstays, and the lyric grotesquerie ("jizzing all day, jizzing all night… whipping up the dairy panna cotta delight", "I’m feeling my bits / Smellin’ my pits / Congealing liquids") makes the lips trill with exhaustion as we err into broken record territory and ask ourselves what year it is.
No Lube So Rude understands sex as a public argument, and Peaches remains one of the few artists willing to make that argument ugly on purpose. The trouble comes when ugliness loses its intelligence. On the standouts, the groove turns filth into force; elsewhere, the record treats shock as a reusable asset, stripped of specificity, ready for export. A comeback, then, that proves the case for Peaches herself while underselling her music.
