peachlyfe - Permission to Roam (2024)

Copenhagen-based artist peachlyfe continues their characteristically disruptive exploration of gender with their first full-length album, Permission to Roam.

With its premise originating in a sci-fi tale co-authored by the artist and Cru Encarnação, Permission to Roam soundtracks a story of love, disguise, sex and fantasy. It follows Jack, a cis man, and Jane, a trans woman, on their existential odyssey through five different realms, where they navigate shifting perspectives on the world while losing their sensory understanding of it—before eventually melding together into one higher non-binary being.

“Even in fantasy and sci-fi, worlds are painted as extremely binary. I wanted to create a surrealist narrative with more fluidity, which presents gender as something of interchangeability,” says peachlyfe.

Sonically translated, Permission to Roam is an eight-track album of fast-paced, club-orientated techno and trance, interwoven with more experimental-leaning offerings—guided by mineral percussion and dark, driving clangour. As the artist states, “I see this album as something more holistic—breaking away from purely that club-ready sound. It was a conceptual process of translating abstract emotions conjured by the text back into the music, and vice versa.”

The album is accompanied by a limited-edition run of the Permission to Roam story as a printed book, illustrated by Istanbul-based artist Cocln. As the seventh release on Nene H’s imprint, UMAY continues as a non-profit label endeavour, sharing the revenue with its artists— an open critique against industry standards, crude label politics and the dominant music business model that Nene H has had to painfully experience herself in recent years.