peach|melba Have A Latte (2025)
You might know Peach Melba as a dessert of ripe peaches, vanilla ice cream and raspberry purée. Created in the 1890s by French haute cuisine legend Auguste Escoffier and named after Nellie Melba, an Australian opera singer whose voice could fill the grandest opera halls of her time.
Now fast-forward almost a century and a half and swap the silver spoon for a chipped mug. Enter peach|melba, the queer femme indie duo split between Brighton (UK) and Los Angeles, who take that polite idea of “having” something and twist it hard. Their song “Have a Latte” (our song of the day, I might add) opens like a broken-record chant in a café at the end of the world: “have a latte / have a cappuccino / have a cold brew /…/ have a danish / have a pain au chocolat…” Coffee, pastries, brunch staples pile up into a hyper-familiar blur of Starbucks capitalism, hipster foodie culture, Instagram latte art, ethical beans in a burning world.
And then the list keeps going, but the menu changes: “have a bombing / have a new colony / … / have a torture / have a mini-genocide.” The same deadpan cadence, the same casual delivery. Using sharp sarcasm, the song parallels everyday indulgence with the all-too-everyday atrocities of our world, making the absurdity of both existing simultaneously feel immediate and unmistakable. Set against raw, garage-punk noise, “Have A Latte” turns the comforts of consumption into a brutal, darkly funny wake-up call.
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