Folk Bitch Trio – Now Would Be A Good Time (Jagjaguwar)
The name Folk Bitch Trio is punky, provocative, even a little tongue-in-cheek, but the music on their debut album Now Would Be A Good Time is quietly radical in a different way.
This is 21st century folk music with its guts still showing: unvarnished, emotionally precise, and startling in its honesty. Across the album’s ten tracks, the Melbourne based trio of Heide Peverelle, Jeanie Pilkington, and Gracie Sinclair reshape folk traditions into something spare, potent, and thoroughly modern.
Though built on familiar ingredients of entwined harmonies, acoustic guitars, restrained percussion, the effect is anything but conventional. There is a disarming closeness in their performances: vocals sit high in the mix, often sounding like they are being whispered directly into your ear. When the harmonies swell, as they do in God’s A Different Sword and Cathode Ray, the effect is quietly transcendent. Lyrically, the band combine poetic abstraction and brutal specificity with wit that skewers platitudes, “My body keeps the score / But if you tell me that you need it / I can get up off my floor” they sing on God’s A Different Sword.
At other moments, the songs pull back into near silence, letting a single voice carry the emotional weight, as on the skeletal I’ll Find a Way (To Carry it All), or the quietly devastating Moth Song, which unfurls like a hallucination, full of fragmented memories and barely contained longing: “I know that it’s half crazy / That’s why I want it more.”
What unites these songs is a shared atmosphere of late at night intensity, truths being told in the lucid, slightly dissociated emotional space when everything seems clearer. Desire, disappointment, confusion, and self-awareness all live here, sometimes in the same verse. Hotel TV and The Actor both chronicle emotional unraveling with forensic attention to detail: one recounts the surreal shame of dreaming about someone else while lying next to your partner; the other, the excruciating tension of being dumped after attending your lover’s one-woman show. These are sharp, often darkly funny snapshots of millennial interior life, where the line “My friends are in the kitchen” carries the weight of betrayal, shame, and absurdity in just a few words.
The arrangements feel tactile and imperfect as guitars chime, bass notes linger, and feedback hums like a distant memory. On Foreign Bird and Sarah, the trio play with dynamics, voices and guitar lines rising and falling in waves. Mary’s Playing the Harp, which closes the album, has a live fragility that recalls Tiny Ruins, Phoebe Bridgers or Gillian Welch. It is not a surprise they share a producer with Tiny Ruins: Tom Healy whose understated, emotional intimate approach enhances the nuances and impact of theses songs.
The trio push their vulnerability to the edge, and in doing so reveal discomfort, desire, and detachment in equal measure. Now Would Be A Good Time is an album of contradictions: airy and dense, minimalist and emotionally maximalist, confessional but never cloying. It is a collection of songs that feel purposefully raw, and that trust their audience to listen closely and sit with discomfort, whether that is the tension in a held breath or a silence that stretches just a beat too long.
For all its melancholy, this is an album full of warm and messy humanity, the sound of three long time friends defiantly singing with emotional clarity through the strange, challenging, and overwhelming business of being young and alive. Together they find, and celebrate, something worthwhile in the morning after.
John Bradbury
Now Would Be A Good Time is released Friday, July 25th on Jagjaguwar Records
Folk Bitch Trio are touring New Zealand on their ‘Now Would Be A Good Time‘ Album Tour with very special guest Georgia Knight
Fri 26 Sep – The Tuning Fork, Auckland
Sat 27 Sep – San Fran, Wellington
Sun 28 Sep – Loons, Lyttelton
Tickets on sale via moshtix.co.nz
