Cast your ear over the local young music circuit of any given town and it’s unlikely that you’ll find many groups of teenagers opting to channel their energies into harmony-rich, emotionally raw modern folk. Such was the case in the Melbourne suburb of Northcote back at the turn of the decade: so much so, in fact, that when Gracie Sinclair, Jeanie Pilkington and Heide Peverelle first started making music together as Folk Bitch Trio, they didn’t even really consider themselves a band.
“It was more of a hangout with singing involved – which it still kind of feels like sometimes,” Pilkington tells NME over video call, sitting on her sofa sandwiched between her two best friends. “That childhood dream of being a rock star wasn’t necessarily something I’d thought about that much. Band culture didn’t resonate with me, and maybe with any of us. Folk Bitch Trio was always this musical project that has so much heart in it that it’s never felt like that.”
Folk Bitch Trio on The Cover of NME. Credit: Ian Laidlaw for NME
Part of the problem was visibility. As the old saying goes, it’s hard to be what you can’t see. “I don’t think I could have looked to anybody and said, ‘That looks doable’ as a 17-year-old girl,” Sinclair suggests. “It was all adults and punk rockers in the pub. And men! That’s maybe the throughline here: it was just lots of men in bands.” But now, five years on and with the release of sublime debut album ‘Now Would Be A Good Time’ around the corner, it’s precisely this mix of close-knit camaraderie, classic melodic influence and relatable femme perspective that’s proving to be their superpower.
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‘Now Would Be A Good Time’ presents the trials and tribulations of the early twenty-something experience with humour and heart, serving it all up with goosebump-worthy three-part harmonies that you rarely find outside of genetic sibling vocal chemistry. Before they started the project, the three had sung together loosely as part of larger school vocal groups, but when they united with their own original material, the alchemy immediately began to spark.
Grace Sinclair of Folk Bitch Trio. Credit: Ian Laidlaw for NME
“Being able to sing such vulnerable songs and feel accepted, that’s maybe where the magic was, because it felt like a really safe and exciting thing that we could all write songs and sing them together,” Peverelle recalls.
That union had come from a jokey invitation from Pilkington to, literally, “start a folk bitch trio”. They played their first show at a local, tiny new band night in a pub put on by Pilkington’s mum – who also encouraged the band to keep the phrase as their chosen moniker. But even getting to that stage of embracing their folky tendencies had been a slow journey. Having grown up with the likes of Joni Mitchell and Gillian Welch, all three admit to a period of early teenage disownment – or at least an attempt at it.
“I don’t think I could have looked to anybody and said, ‘That looks doable’ as a 17-year-old girl” – Gracie Sinclair
“From Year 8 to Year 11, I was like, ‘I’m only gonna listen to King Krule and Loyle Carner. I don’t wanna listen to any dainty folk shit, that’s so lame’,” Peverelle laughs. Pilkington “just wanted to play major seventh chords on my electric guitar”; Sinclair listened to a lot of hip-hop. “When you’re 17, it’s not really at the forefront of what you’d be telling your homies that you’re into; that you listen to music that your parents had shown you,” Sinclair chuckles. “But I remember figuring out that Jeanie listened to Gillian Welch and being like… ‘Huh! We ain’t so different!’”
It’s perhaps this misleading image of folk as “dainty” that put their young selves off, but the artists that Folk Bitch Trio love – and the music that they, in turn, make themselves – is far from twee. Moving through mortifying romantic failure (‘The Actor’), delirious unrequited love (‘Moth Song’) and crippling identity crises (‘Cathode Ray’), ‘Now Would Be A Good Time’ finds the band continuing the far more resonant legacy of folk as a vehicle for pain and catharsis.
Jeanie Pilkington of Folk Bitch Trio. Credit: Ian Laidaw for NME
“There’s Joni, there’s Sibylle Baier, there’s Karen Dalton, Nick Drake – all of those people play beautiful songs, but when you listen to the lyrics, it’s dark stuff,” says Peverelle. “They’re touching on death and suicide and mental health issues and poverty and heartbreak and race. I can’t actually think of anything that is that straight down the middle, dainty folk.”
They credit the “other folk bitches – people like Julia Jacklin, Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen” as helping to reinvigorate the genre in recent years. “They were the ones that helped us fall back in love with folk and realise that everything’s cool in its own way,” Peverelle nods. Meanwhile, it was a member of another trio that first helped launch them into public consciousness: in a 2021 radio interview, Phoebe Bridgers described their debut single ‘Edie’ as “Boygenius if it was from the ’40s”.
“Being able to sing such vulnerable songs and feel accepted – that’s maybe where the magic was” – Heide Peverelle
Folk Bitch Trio would rather the wider world judge them on their own merit than try to cast them as Boygenius from down under. “Obviously, it’s different when it’s Phoebe drawing that opinion, as I’m sure it’s much more nuanced, but it’s hard to not see it as a comparison to another triple-femme band because there’s simply not enough of them for people to not go there,” Pilkington says. “It does feel frustrating, but that has nothing to do with Boygenius and everything to do with a lack of attention on femme-led music.”
However, the surrealness of the moment was clearly not lost on them. “She was definitely my number one Spotify listen at the time,” Pilkington smiles. “I guess that was when I started to become aware that people were formulating opinions on us and consuming the music, and that felt completely bizarre.”
Heide Peverelle of Folk Bitch Trio. Credit: Ian Laidlaw for NME
Now all aged 23, Folk Bitch Trio have become an unshakeable unit, their close bond helping them deal with the world’s perceptions, both as budding artists taking early steps into the industry – they signed to Jagjaguwar earlier this year – and as young femme-presenting people in the world. “I look at other artists trying to navigate it on their own and I can’t really imagine not having my two other brain cells with me all the time,” Sinclair says.
Pilkington nods: “When you’re in this funny grey area of having the success that we’re so lucky to have had, but also doing small, weird gigs and having strange people approach you, sometimes we feel like our life is a bit like Flight of the Conchords. It becomes fun when your friends are with you, but if you were by yourself, you might be crying and not laughing…”
“Band culture didn’t resonate with me, and maybe with any of us” – Jeanie Pilkington
The same approach of taking tough situations and finding the funny side rings throughout their music, whether in ‘God’s A Different Sword’’s satirical wink to feminist text The Body Keeps The Score or ‘That’s All She Wrote’’s fears of getting “doxxed in the paper”. Peverelle calls their songs “our pathetic little tragedies”. They laugh about how being in your early twenties is “pathetic”, but, as Peverelle says, it’s also “fun, messy – always – but never that bad. Our tragedies are miniscule in the scheme of what’s going on in the world, but they’re our tragedies.”
“And there’s something so important about being able to transform that into art,” Sinclair nods. “There are many things in my life that I would not have survived if it hadn’t been for people transforming their pathetic little tragedies into a song or a piece of art that I could consume.”
The three pals might be naturally self-deprecating and light-hearted when it comes to describing themselves (“The line between joke and sincere is difficult to find when we’re spending time together,” Pilkington notes), but Folk Bitch Trio gives them a place to take their stories – and the lived realities of being young and finding your feet in the world – seriously. As Sinclair points out: “With the songs we write, you’re kind of put in this position where you’ve got to stand upright with it. If you’re going to talk about your emotions, you can’t be that corny if you’re gonna make your other two best homies sing it.”
Credit: Ian Laidlaw for NME
Friends for over a decade, they’re coming into the giddy whirlwind of their debut with a rock-solid foundation. “Jeanie and Heide are the two best songwriters I know,” Sinclair smiles. “The pleasure of getting to work together is that it’s so easy to champion your team when you feel like you’re with the best.”
The wider world is starting to see that she might have a point. Recently, the band hopped over to European shores to play sold-out shows in London and Paris, as well as buzzy turns at Brighton’s Great Escape. Back on home turf, they kicked off a support tour with Rufus Wainwright by singing with him on stage at the Sydney Opera House.
Having started with “non-existent expectations”, carving out their own path in a local scene that initially felt like it had no place for them, now Folk Bitch Trio are one of Melbourne’s most exciting exports, whose potential feels as wide as their own uninhibited thinking. “There are things like playing the Opera House that you don’t even think to put on a bucket list. Having a billboard in Times Square was not on the bucket list, but it was pretty baller,” Pilkington laughs. “With this project, there’s really not much that we don’t want to do.”
Folk Bitch Trio’s ‘Now Would Be A Good Time’ is out on July 25 via Jagjaguwar.
Listen to Folk Bitch Trio’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Lisa Wright
Photography: Ian Laidlaw
Styling: Folk Bitch Trio and Jess Fu
Label: Jagjaguwar
