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FOLK BITCH TRIO
Now Would Be A Good Time(Jagjaguwar)
Add date: 7.29.2025
Release date: 7.25.2025
Links:
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Instagram
Official Website
Spotify
Tidal
YouTube
Now Would Be A Good Time, the debut album by Folk Bitch Trio, tells vivid, visceral stories. Their music sounds familiar, and it’s built on a foundation of the music they’ve loved throughout their lives–gnarled Americana, classic rock, piquant, clear-eyed balladry. But 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. Peverelle recalls sending Pilkington a heartbroken—in their words “bad”—song they had written called “Edie”; Pilkington remembers the song differently. “I felt so inspired that my teenage peer had written something so honest and original,” she recalls. It wasn’t long before she messaged Peverelle and Sinclair, asking if they’d be interested in starting a “folk bitch trio.” As soon as they started singing together, their connection deepened, and “the chemistry of being inspired by each other was evident from the get-go,” says Sinclair.
Listening to Folk Bitch Trio, it’s clear that this is a band of three distinct points of view, with contrasting and complementary backgrounds and visions. Pilkington grew up with two musician parents and brings formative memories of watching them perform, of listening to Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams, and of her own imagined path as a career musician. 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 music has a bad habit of being presented as a deathly serious concern. It’s the music you cry to, it’s overly sacred, it’s solemnly considered by critic-historians. But 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. On “Gods A Different Sword” they crack that “My body keeps the score/But if you tell me that you need it/I can get up off my floor,” a nod to the clichéd, over-referenced millennial self-help book, as they wryly sing about sex within earshot of housemates, and wring sexual innuendo from physics terminology.
While a lot of Folk Bitch Trio’s early songs were written individually and then brought to the group, the songs on Now Would Be A Good Time were workshopped on tour and written specifically with their shared connection in mind. Recording in Auckland with Tom Healy (Tiny Ruins, Marlon Williams) during winter 2024, the band built out these songs with minimalist, idiosyncratic arrangements. Recording to tape was the final missing thread in bringing Now Would Be A Good Time to life. Voices and guitar took centre stage, and once the tape machine was whirring, the production voice the band struggled to articulate through digital recording was brought to fruition. Finally, they sounded like Folk Bitch Trio.
“Foreign Bird” builds to a place that’s dense and rich, Folk Bitch Trio’s grand harmonies cut with ringing guitar feedback. “Mary’s Playing The Harp”, the record’s closer, is a live take of three voices and one guitar, written about touring regional Australia with a broken heart. “Moth Song”, a song about unrequited love and “being so spun out by everything that you feel like you’re delusional and hallucinating crazy things,” forms the album’s spare centrepiece, Anita Clark’s undulating violin part drifting in and out of focus as if from a dream.
Other songs aren’t as oblique, instead chronicling brutally familiar moments at the end of relationships: The tense, emotionally volatile torch song “The Actor”, says Peverelle, is about “going to your partner’s one-woman show and then getting broken up with”. “Hotel TV”, a hypnotic, late-night reverie, is about “having a sex dream about somebody else while next to your partner, and your partner being a liar,” explains Pilkington. “Cathode Ray”, on the other hand, is about bodily, deeply human anxieties: “It expresses a feeling of being trapped in myself, and wanting to break out of that so violently that I’m literally talking about opening up a body viscerally,” says Sinclair. “It’s about frustration, and knowing there’s no cheap thrill that’s going to fix that.”
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. They’ve signed with Jagjaguwar, a home for singular icons and iconoclasts (Bon Iver, Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten, UMO and others), and they’ve found their first diehard fans with dazzling harmonies and acerbic lyricism that transcend genre expectations and audience lines.
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.
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Official Website
Spotify
Tidal
YouTube
Now Would Be A Good Time, the debut album by Folk Bitch Trio, tells vivid, visceral stories. Their music sounds familiar, and it’s built on a foundation of the music they’ve loved throughout their lives–gnarled Americana, classic rock, piquant, clear-eyed balladry. But 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. Peverelle recalls sending Pilkington a heartbroken—in their words “bad”—song they had written called “Edie”; Pilkington remembers the song differently. “I felt so inspired that my teenage peer had written something so honest and original,” she recalls. It wasn’t long before she messaged Peverelle and Sinclair, asking if they’d be interested in starting a “folk bitch trio.” As soon as they started singing together, their connection deepened, and “the chemistry of being inspired by each other was evident from the get-go,” says Sinclair.
Listening to Folk Bitch Trio, it’s clear that this is a band of three distinct points of view, with contrasting and complementary backgrounds and visions. Pilkington grew up with two musician parents and brings formative memories of watching them perform, of listening to Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams, and of her own imagined path as a career musician. 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 music has a bad habit of being presented as a deathly serious concern. It’s the music you cry to, it’s overly sacred, it’s solemnly considered by critic-historians. But 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. On “Gods A Different Sword” they crack that “My body keeps the score/But if you tell me that you need it/I can get up off my floor,” a nod to the clichéd, over-referenced millennial self-help book, as they wryly sing about sex within earshot of housemates, and wring sexual innuendo from physics terminology.
While a lot of Folk Bitch Trio’s early songs were written individually and then brought to the group, the songs on Now Would Be A Good Time were workshopped on tour and written specifically with their shared connection in mind. Recording in Auckland with Tom Healy (Tiny Ruins, Marlon Williams) during winter 2024, the band built out these songs with minimalist, idiosyncratic arrangements. Recording to tape was the final missing thread in bringing Now Would Be A Good Time to life. Voices and guitar took centre stage, and once the tape machine was whirring, the production voice the band struggled to articulate through digital recording was brought to fruition. Finally, they sounded like Folk Bitch Trio.
“Foreign Bird” builds to a place that’s dense and rich, Folk Bitch Trio’s grand harmonies cut with ringing guitar feedback. “Mary’s Playing The Harp”, the record’s closer, is a live take of three voices and one guitar, written about touring regional Australia with a broken heart. “Moth Song”, a song about unrequited love and “being so spun out by everything that you feel like you’re delusional and hallucinating crazy things,” forms the album’s spare centrepiece, Anita Clark’s undulating violin part drifting in and out of focus as if from a dream.
Other songs aren’t as oblique, instead chronicling brutally familiar moments at the end of relationships: The tense, emotionally volatile torch song “The Actor”, says Peverelle, is about “going to your partner’s one-woman show and then getting broken up with”. “Hotel TV”, a hypnotic, late-night reverie, is about “having a sex dream about somebody else while next to your partner, and your partner being a liar,” explains Pilkington. “Cathode Ray”, on the other hand, is about bodily, deeply human anxieties: “It expresses a feeling of being trapped in myself, and wanting to break out of that so violently that I’m literally talking about opening up a body viscerally,” says Sinclair. “It’s about frustration, and knowing there’s no cheap thrill that’s going to fix that.”
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. They’ve signed with Jagjaguwar, a home for singular icons and iconoclasts (Bon Iver, Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten, UMO and others), and they’ve found their first diehard fans with dazzling harmonies and acerbic lyricism that transcend genre expectations and audience lines.
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.