W/ Katy Kirby (USA)

Now Would Be A Good Time, (out July 25th) the debut album by Folk Bitch Trio, tells vivid, visceral stories. The songs are modern, youthful, singing acutely through dissociative daydreams and galling breakups, sexual fantasies and media overload, all the petty resentments and minor humiliations of being in your early twenties in the 2020s. 

Heide Peverelle (they/them), Jeanie Pilkington (she/her) and Gracie Sinclair (she/her) have known each other since high school, and first started singing together five years ago. Pilkington grew up with two musician parents and brings formative memories of watching them perform, of listening to Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams. Peverelle spends their spare time making art and furniture; those hobbies, as well as their love of pop music old and new, articulate a love for the tactile, the home-grown and the hand-made. Sinclair is the self-proclaimed jester of the group, but her taste skews dark, gothic, baroque and dramatic, expressed as a love of opera and ballet as well as musicians as wide-ranging as Patti Smith, Nirvana and Tchaikovsky.

Folk Bitch Trio have a shared sense of humour that is embedded deep in their music and that sets it alight, safe from the self-serious traps of the genre. Now Would Be A Good Time is funny and darkly ironic in the manner of writers like Mary Gaitskill or Otessa Moshfegh. Recording in Auckland with Tom Healy (Tiny Ruins, Marlon Williams) during the winter of 2024, the band built out these songs with minimalist, idiosyncratic arrangements. Recording to tape was the final missing thread in bringing the album to life.  Voices and guitar took centre stage, and the production voice the band struggled to articulate through digital recording was brought to fruition. Finally, they sounded like Folk Bitch Trio.   

The strongest link between the trio, aside from friendship, is music. “We all talked about loving music when we were growing up, and knowing we wanted music to be a big part of our lives,” says Pilkington. “But for me at least, when I looked into the future, it was this relatively mysterious thing.” Joining forces as a group demystified that future.  “When we started singing together,” they continue, “it immediately became the vehicle for my songs and my love of music, and we all had that in common.” That feeling—of music as an innate calling, as opposed to hobby or folly—was justified: Folk Bitch Trio have already toured across Australia, Europe and the US, supporting bands as disparate as King Gizzard, Alex G and Julia Jacklin and signing with iconic indie label Jagjaguwar.

These are the stakes: Learning how to live a life free of lovesickness and loser exes, when to sink into contemporary nihilism and when to have a laugh with your friends, and why being alive can feel so ephemeral and unreal. In this sense, Now Would Be A Good Time feels like a manual for modern living: a missive from three proud Folk Bitches finding beauty and wisdom where they can, together.