Folk Bitch Trio Announce Debut Album, Now Would Be A Good Time, Out July 25th Via Jagjaguwar

Folk Bitch Trio — the Melbourne/Naarm-based band of Gracie Sinclair (she/her), Jeanie Pilkington (she/her) and Heide Peverelle (they/them) — announce their debut album, Now Would Be A Good Time, out July 25th via Jagjaguwar, and release the single/video, 'Cathode Ray.' Now Would Be A Good Time tells vivid, visceral stories. Their music sounds familiar, built on a foundation of the music they’ve loved throughout their lives–gnarled Americana, classic rock, piquant, and clear-eyed balladry. Yet the songs are modern and youthful, with the trio singing acutely through dissociative daydreams, galling breakups, sexual fantasies and media overload— all the petty resentments and minor humiliations of being in your early twenties in the 2020s.

Listening to Folk Bitch Trio, it’s clear this is a band of three distinct points of view. 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. They’ve known each other since high school, and as soon as they started singing together five years ago, “the chemistry of being inspired by each other was evident from the get-go,” says Sinclair.

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Following the “acidic and gorgeous” (Beats Per Minute) lead single The Actor, dubbed a “Song You Need to Know” by Rolling Stone, today’s single, 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. Lyrically, the song 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,” Sinclair explains. “It’s about frustration, and knowing there’s no cheap thrill that’s going to fix that.”

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, and, with voices and guitar taking center stage, recorded to tape as the final missing thread in bringing the album to life.

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. 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, and found their first fans with their dazzling harmonies and acerbic lyricism that transcend genre expectations and audience lines.

Folk Bitch Trio announce their debut album release tour of New Zealand, playing headline shows in Auckland, Wellington & Christchurch.

Tickets available from Moshtix from Friday, May 16.

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