PEGGY
Bio
Once upon a time, a seemingly “normal” young girl grabbed the reins and chose to tell her story. She didn’t ask for permission. She didn’t rely on anybody else. She didn’t worry about what the world might think.
Rather, she unapologetically embraced every personal whim and whimsy and followed her muse to the truest creative representation of herself…
Perceiving pop through an otherworldly prism of her own design, Michigan-born singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer PEGGY brings classic mythmaking to alternative music. With Promethean power, she finds fire in the fantastical and uses it to light the way forward on her aptly titled 2026 full-length debut LP, ONCE UPON A TIME [Nettwerk Music Group].
“For my whole life, I’ve always felt like an alien,” she admits. “With music and art, it’s different. I’m making what I call ‘fantasy pop.’ I want it to be a safe space for anyone who needs an escape from the world or even somewhere to go outside of reality for a bit. This is where I landed; I’m going to stay here for a while.”
PEGGY has carefully architected this place since her emergence in 2021. She catalyzed TikTok virality into a living and breathing community of likeminded fans. Her first single “Fictional Men” surged with 23 million Spotify streams followed by “Villains Aren’t Born (They’re Made)” with another 21 million Spotify streams. In its wake, “ALICE” exploded, generating over 61 million Spotify streams and setting the stage for 2024’s DEAR READER EP. A year later, she continued to enchant with the COMING OF AGE EP in 2025. Inciting critical applause, Melodic Magazine marveled at how, “PEGGY has continued to carve out a space where pop meets fiction fanatics,” and Pop Passion Blog applauded her “emotionally-driven music, rooted in the vision of strong romances.”
Throughout 2025, she assembled what would become ONCE UPON A TIME alongside producer Magnus Skylstad [AURORA] during sessions in Los Angeles and Norway.
“I had wanted to work with Magnus forever, because AURORA’s ‘Runaway’ is one of my favorite songs ever,” she notes. “He really helped with so much. I was finally able to achieve the sound I wanted.”
The album’s opener and lead single “FRANKENSTEIN” evokes the push-and-pull at the core of PEGGY’s signature style. Conceived after watching Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, echoes of her breathy hum ripple across gentle keys. As the momentum builds, she recognizes, “Cannot rest until I exorcise this demon.” Ready to let go, a high-pitched exhale carries the cathartic chorus, “I’ve learned the monster is the man. He isn’t worth my time. I’d make the man myself, but I’m not Victor Frankenstein.”
“I think Frankenstein is one of the best books of all-time,” she says. “The creature wasn’t the monster. Dr. Victor Frankenstein was the monster, because he played God, tried to create life, and abandoned it pretty much as soon as he created it. The creature didn’t ask to be born, and he doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s a metaphor for my own savior complex. I’ve learned you can’t help someone by changing them. I’ll date a person who will do something I didn’t expect, and I’ll think, ‘The version of this individual in my brain wouldn’t do that’.”
“ORPHEUS” climbs out of hell on the vaporous trail of a piano arpeggio guided by her bright delivery. Choral harmonies and bold power chords underline a portentous plea repeated like a mantra, “Don’t look back Orpheus, you’ll make it worse. Another Greek tragedy that cannot be reversed.”
“The tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is an important Greek myth,” she reveals. “On their wedding day, Eurydice is bitten by a snake and dies. Orpheus goes into the underworld to retrieve her. Hades gives him an ultimatum, ‘You can bring Eurydice back to the overworld, but only if you walk out and don’t look back at her once’. He looks back right at the end, and Eurydice is stuck forever. I relate to it as a metaphor for not looking back on past failures to determine how you will act in the future.”
She blasts off above the clouds on “STARCROSSED” [feat. Lydia the Bard]. Delicately pinched strings and keys twinkle and glimmer akin to a constellation at midnight. Opening up the escape hatch, she urges, “Run away with me into the night…somewhere that they’ll never find.”
“It examines the trope of starcrossed lovers,” she notes. “My character is saying, ‘There’s no point in trying’, but Lydia’s character says, ‘There is hope’. However, my character dies!”
A twinge of harp pierces the haze on “PANDORA’S BOX.” Handclaps push the hook to breathtaking heights as she teases through gritted teeth, “Do you think you’re special?”
“I’m tackling the climate crisis from the voice of Atlas because he holds the world,” she elaborates. “The world only gets heavier in terms of pollution and everything going on. So, what if Atlas drops the world? He’s chastising those in power for how their choices to fill their pockets impact the environment.”
Then, there’s “Imitate.” Rejecting the overreach of A.I., violin groans alongside pulsating beat-craft. The piano tenses up only to release rage with a distorted crunch on the chorus, “So watch me imitate everything that you’ve done.”
“The purveyors of A.I. don’t understand its impact on the lives and careers of others, because it doesn’t affect them,” she sighs. “Having empathy and understanding why someone else might think differently than you is a big issue. The song is from the vantage point of a chatbot that realizes it’s a chatbot. It knows everything, so it technically believes it’s a god. As a god, it decides to endlessly imitate everyone until the human race dies out. ‘Imitate’ is definitely similar to a horror movie.”
The finale “HERETIC” doesn’t mince words. Instead, she stands up and laments fascism without filter, “He’s the monster your mother warned you about.”
“It’s the story of the people overthrowing a mad king,” she reveals. “It’s a metaphor for my feelings on the government right now.”
As intimate as it is universal, PEGGY’s myth is timeless.
“If you take 45 minutes and listen to the record in its entirety, I hope it exists as a little story in your head,” she leaves off. “There are meanings, lessons, and pieces of wisdom in each of the songs, but the album can really mean anything you need it to.”