Now Would Be A Good Time

Folk music has a bad habit of being presented as a deathly serious concern. It’s something you cry to, it’s overly sacred, it’s solemnly considered by critic-historians. But Folk Bitch Trio, former high school friends Heide Peverelle (they/them), Jeanie Pilkington (she/her) and Gracie Sinclair (she/her), 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, their debut album, tells vivid, visceral stories, and is funny and darkly ironic in the manner of writers like Mary Gaitskill or Otessa Moshfegh. Their music sounds familiar, 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. 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.