“Fuck the Pain Away” is the first track on Canadian electroclash artist Merrill Beth Nisker’s (stage name Peaches) second studio album The Teaches of Peaches. Released on September 5th, 2000 on Kitty-Yo/XL, The Teaches of Peaches features backing vocals by her then-roommate, Feist.

“Fuck the Pain Away” was the first song to get Peaches mainstream attention and has since become her signature song. The track established her identity as a sex-positive feminist by disregarding gender norms and using sexually-explicit lyrics.

Peaches later revealed in an interview with The Guardian that the song was written in the wake of having thyroid cancer:

It sounds fun when I sing Fuck the Pain Away, but it also has that obvious pain… It was very important to me when I was writing Teaches of Peaches that I didn’t mention I was going through a bad breakup, or that I had had cancer. I didn’t want the album to be seen as being made by a survivor who’d broken away from this heteronormative relationship. I didn’t want that to preface the actual power of the music. I wanted it to stand on its own. Doing it like that was a great way for me to get out all my anger and sadness, but not feel sorry for myself. I could also feel like I was moving on in a really tangible way. Because these feelings were so real, I think they really came through in the music. Even though I was using a very cold machine and computer, I brought a warmth to it and a relatability.