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.

“Cathode Ray” opens with caution, its first harmonies arriving in big, looping sighs. It’s vulnerable but a little menacing, with a wide open chorus and a spacious, airy beat anchoring everything. “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.

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. 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.