Folk Bitch Trio Debut headline show in Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland

Melbourne’s alluring Folk Bitch Trio have announced their debut album release tour of New Zealand, playing headline shows in Auckland, Wellington & Christchurch.

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.