Rosie Peppé: The student singer-songwriter refreshingly unapologetic about expressing the candid, uncombed essence of love

The student opener of this year’s Bacchanal, Rosie Peppé approaches songwriting and performing with a devotion to expressing not just her experience with love but all that is human and anomalous about the universal emotion. 

Photo provided by Rosie Peppé

By Sasha Zimet

April 23, 2026

In the hullabaloo of last-minute headliners, buzzing crowds, and radiantly sunny skies, this year’s Bacchanal certainly did not lack bustling, exciting activity. One of the most compelling moments of the festival, however, was the performer who opened it: Rosie Peppé.

Despite only attending Columbia for the 2025-2026 academic year as an exchange student from the U.K. in her junior year, Peppé has already made a name for herself on campus as an exuberantly talented musician. Her captivating voice charmed students to vote for her as the winner of Battle of the Bands, and thereby, Bacchanal’s student opener. Whether she is recontextualizing an ordinarily somber love-song ballad into a song people can dance to or writing poetically powerful lyrics about loving loudly and unapologetically, singer-songwriter Rosie Peppé is an artist dedicated to expressing the symphony of love. 

Photo provided by Rosie Peppé

For Peppé, music has come as second nature for as long as she can remember. Growing up in Ibiza, Spain, Peppé was immersed in a musical environment that, although skewed more toward the EDM genre, nevertheless instilled in Peppé the belief that being a musician was something she could realistically pursue. She felt magnetized toward the music industry as a whole: “I just constantly felt myself drawn towards wanting to be within that industry,” said Peppé. For Peppé, a life void of music was akin to a life void of breath. “I feel like it’s like having another pair of lungs,” noted the singer. 

Songwriting came just as naturally for Peppé. Although she formally began writing lyrics when she was 13, Peppé has really been writing songs since she was 4 years old. “My mum sent me a picture of something that I wrote when I was 4 years old,” recalled the singer, “and it was a poem about my cats or something to do with animals. I can’t even remember. But it was rhyming like a song.” 

Peppé wrote her first proper song, however, when she was 13. A boy a few years above her in school needed a singer for an assignment at school, and Peppé, being a vetted vocalist in the musical theater scene at her high school, was the most obvious choice. She collaborated with him and wrote her first official song, and from there, the ink seeping from her lyrical pen just never seemed to go dry: “It’s like when you find a missing puzzle piece and you can finally complete something. That’s what it feels like when you’ve really finished a song.” 

At 13, the pet-based scrawlings written by 4-year-old Peppé transformed to mirror her current-day theme: love. Love has been an unwavering throughline of Peppé’s music: “It was always about love,” said the singer. “I’m just not feeling anything else as much as I’m feeling love.” And, this love motif is not exclusive to romantic relationships, but rather is an authentic expression of the singer’s raw emotion. “I’m not trying to make a big statement about anything. I’m just trying to say how I’m feeling, which is, like, you know, I make stupid decisions with my love life sometimes, and I also love a lot of my friends so deeply, and even with my family and moving away and being so far from home. All of it is love,” said Peppé. 

Peppé’s entire songwriting process is by and large instigated by the often sporadic, ebb-and-flow nature of love’s emotions. When asked the canonical chicken-or-egg question — what comes first: the tune or the lyrics — Peppé rejected this black-and-white distinction behind the process of writing a song and instead expressed how it is more so a transcendent interweaving of feeling: “Sometimes I’ll have a tune stuck in my head all day, and I’ll be like, oh my God I need to put this down,” said the singer, “or I’ll sit in bed one night and I’ll be pissed off at the world, usually because of a man, and I’ll just write a little something, and then I’ll find a way to make it rhythmic.” Peppé does not seek out the song; the song seeks her out. “Whenever I’m forcing it and I’m trying to write something, it’s not happened. It has to come from an impulse or a source of inspiration, whether that’s another piece of music or an emotion that I’m feeling,” she explained.

Much of the musical sources that inspire Peppé are derived from an eclectic array of artists, whether it be Amy Winehouse and Adele or indie-punk musicians like The Clash. The rebellious, non-conformist beat of punk music coalesces with Peppé’s dedication to expressing the messy, human process of love: “I just think that there’s something kind of rebellious about it. I just love the whole idea of not being a perfect human.” Yet the more somber, melodious tunes of Amy Winehouse ballads do not contradict this rebellion, but serve as inspiration for Peppé’s expression of raw emotion: “[Amy Winehouse] exposes stuff that you just wouldn’t say in public, but she’s writing it to the public. She’s writing it for people to hear it because she’s like, ‘that’s how in love I was.’ And that’s what someone did to me. And I think that’s so raw,” said Peppé. 

Though the process of creating and writing her music is more concentrated on the hyper-personal, the act of performing it metamorphoses Peppé’s songs into an active conversation between the singer and her audience. Peppé first got her bearings performing her own work at 15, working in a musical theater-themed restaurant. She would greet customers with her own music, mesmerizing ears with her earnest lyrics and velvety tunes. Though at the time she was experiencing “proper imposter syndrome” and could not fathom that people were paying to hear her perform, the experience nevertheless served as the impetus for Peppé’s performing career, which only further expanded when she moved to the U.K. at 18 for university. “Now, I feel like I’ve really found a sound. And I realized I love having fun onstage. I love chatting with an audience,” said the singer. “I love people just enjoying themselves, having a great time, screaming, heckling.” 

Still, the earnest, emotional tunes that are innate to her lyricism at first served as a roadblock to Peppé’s performance style, clashing with the fun, upbeat energy each and every performance curates. “Before, I think I just performed and tried to be, like, a little bit more on the sadder side, because I love a love song,” said Peppé. However, the themes of Peppé’s lyricism did not deter her from maintaining her interactive performance style, prodding her to experiment with rhythm and find a tune that could express love through a lively performance. “I started adopting that into my writing and into what type of music I want to make because of the energy that it gives off in a live show. I’m trying to find that in between of writing a ballad that you can dance to.” 

As Peppé tries to strike the balance between expressing the messy emotion of love within the seams of upbeat dancing tempos, her newest music follows suit. One of the songs the singer performed at Bacchanal — which will be released within one month — “Summer in West Amsterdam,” tackles the motif of love in an especially forgiving, honest, and enigmatic way. “The song is literally about me getting a phone call from a guy who I know is gonna hurt me,” said Peppé, yet it resounds in the ultimate conclusion of giving yourself grace and allowing yourself to make mistakes in the name of love. “You’re allowed to love loudly,” said the singer. 

Another song Peppé has worked on, “Reasons,” tackles the more fun, expressive nature of love. “One of the things that I focused on, which is a bit cheeky, is that girls want things as well. Like, sometimes girls also want to have fun,” noted the singer when describing the themes of the tune.

Peppé’s newest EP, which is set to release this year, falls in line with her dedication to subversively documenting all that is messy, real, fun, and rebellious in the name of love. “The word of my EP is unapologetic,” noted Peppé when describing the soon-to-be-released songs. The EP’s centripetal force is the ebbs and flows, mistakes and errors, and unadulterated fun innate to the all-too-human experience of love. “I love loudly and live passionately,” said Peppé, and, accordingly, her music does, too.