The credit roll for Peaches’ new “Fuck the Pain Away” is six names long, and she wants them read out loud. In a post announcing that the rework and its video are now “streaming everywhere,” the electroclash veteran tagged the performers who fill the frame — @bleach.babychino, @dan.rkn, @nancynutter_, @natashavlio, @street.walker and @rolereverso — under a greeting that doubles as a mission statement: “Shoutout to my hot performers.”
The track they’re in is her first official remix of the song that made her, retooled for Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, the survival-horror game from Saber Interactive due October 8 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2. Saber music director Steve Molitz produced the rework, and Doug Bradley — Pinhead himself — narrates over it, which Peaches frames as a “darker, more twisted” spin on a song she has performed for more than a quarter-century.
“‘Fuck the Pain Away’ is ever-expanding and now has new meaning in the Hellraiser universe,” Peaches said when the rework was unveiled. “I’m in!”
There’s plenty to expand. The original opened The Teaches of Peaches, released in September 2000 on Berlin’s Kitty-Yo label and later picked up by XL Recordings, and it was famously not a studio creation at all: the version the world knows was captured live in Toronto, bought off a sound engineer for $5, and built from a rumbling low-fidelity bass and a Roland TR-909 snare. Rolling Stone later placed it among its 25 Essential LGBTQ Pride Songs, and the album moved roughly 50,000 copies before launching four more Peaches records.
Molitz, who also scored the game, describes his version as “a raw, abrasive, three-act descent into a hellscape of transcendence, excess, compulsion and distortion.” The accompanying video matches that brief: hairy pasties, blood, chains and a leather-clad orgy staged as a nod to the 1987 film’s pleasure-and-pain theology.
The rework lands in a busy stretch. February brought No Lube So Rude, her first album since 2015’s Rub, which was shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize; a year earlier she was the subject of Teaches of Peaches, the Philipp Fussenegger and Judy Landkammer documentary shot around her 2022 anniversary tour that won the Teddy Award for best documentary at the Berlinale.
Her touring company has been part of the story throughout — Teaches of Peaches puts dancers, dressers and lighting crew on screen alongside Leslie Feist and Chilly Gonzales. Naming six performers in a launch post is of a piece with that.
Next up is a different kind of venue: Peaches joins the Fonda’s 100th-anniversary bill on October 17 in Los Angeles, with Gelli Haha and Soltera opening. Pinhead, so far, is not on the lineup.
