For the Melbourne-based band, irony, oversharing, and emotional collapse coexist with tenderness and tradition.

With their anticipated debut album ‘Now Would Be a Good Time’, Folk Bitch Trio lean into folk tradition while offering an unpolished account of navigating your early twenties through contemporary anxieties. The Melbourne-based trio of Gracie Sinclair, Jeanie Pilkington, and Heide Peverell invites listeners into the intimacy of a late-night conversation between friends, with candlelight flickering, wine half gone, and the sky beginning to bruise with morning. It is a debut dripping with irony and hollow with longing.

Through acoustic arrangements and hypnotic harmonies, the album speaks to delusional romantics, overthinkers, the dark-humoured, and the daydream-prone. With tracks comprising, in the bands words, “dissociative daydreams and galling breakups, sexual fantasies and media overload”, ‘Now Would Be a Good Time’ is folk music for people who laugh while falling apart, and who find relief in doing so.

The opening line, “Am I lucky? / Or am I just sane?” sets the tone of the album. The record is free of polish and pretence. There are just three voices cutting through stripped-back strings. From the first chord of ‘God’s a Different Sword’, Folk Bitch Trio pulls the listener into a space of ambiguity and irony, where the lines between blessings and burdens blur.

The emotional texture of the record is shaped by confessional storytelling, infused with honesty and humour. ‘Hotel TV’ is a late-night anthem, telling the story of having a “filthy dream” about someone else while lying next to your partner. A gritty guitar delivers a gentle melody, echoing the contrast between sharp-edged lyrics and soft humming. There is something cathartic about the way humour is woven between the lines and layered with raw emotion.

On the album’s third track, ‘The Actor’, the lyrics, “Afternoon fuck and then a fight / When everybody’s listening / My friends are in the kitchen” are harmonised over raw guitar strums. The moment is messy, coarse, and liberatingly human, storytelling that reinterprets the folk genre for the present day.

The Australian trio has made a record that comforts in its familiarity but remains self-aware enough to sting. The album is brimming with vulnerability. ‘Moth Song’, a confession of unrequited love, feels like reading handwritten pages ripped from a journal. “It’s about being so spun out by everything that you feel like you’re delusional and hallucinating crazy things,” says Sinclair. A soft violin drifts in and out like a dream, and the vocal harmonies carry a quality of closeness and quiet intensity.

Folk Bitch Trio reject the notion that folk music should be serious and sacred. The band have carved out a well-deserved space in the contemporary popular music scene while preserving the core of traditional folk. The musical arrangements are minimal, driven by acoustic guitar, while the lyrics are narrative and delivered with bare, unvarnished vocals. These are features which embody the authentic nature of folk music. On ‘I’ll Find A Way’, the trio sing acapella, and the harmonised repetition of the title aches with quiet catharsis. Yet the energy across the record remains playful through lyrics that are lined with wit. Folk Bitch Trio are afraid neither of vulnerability nor laughter. It is this balance of emotional depth and narrative humour that gives the album a warmth that lingers. 

One of the most poignant moments arrives in ‘Cathode Ray’. An unrefined guitar strum is underscored by steady percussion, grounding the song. The line “Better late than dead on time” reads as both a vulnerable confession and a dark joke, where disarray feels safer than control. The lyric “come undone” is echoed as an intimate request. Its hypnotic repetition becomes a chant for breaking down on display, capturing the visceral unravelling of physical and emotional exposure.

There is something freeing about the album’s unpolished recordings. The trio’s raw voices cut through the ringing guitar feedback on ‘Foreign Bird’, unafraid to sit in dissonance. These moments of jitter, from the reverb-heavy guitar on ‘Sarah’ to the gritty texture of ‘Hotel TV’, amplify the intimacy of the debut. The record does not try to impress. It holds tension in its simplicity and finds beauty in letting things fall apart. “A bloody punch that moves like a quaver” is sung over the rich sound of plucked strings on ‘That’s All She Wrote’.

With ‘Now Would Be a Good Time’, Folk Bitch Trio reclaim folk as a genre that reaches beyond solemn introspection. It becomes a space where disillusionment and emotional chaos meet softness and humility. The closing track, ‘Mary’s Playing the Harp’, is a live recording. The minimalism of the song makes for a quiet paean to the tradition with which they interact. The three voices harmonise over a gentle strum as they sing about touring Australia with a broken heart. It is a powerful finale as the record fades into a lingering stillness.

There is a deep sense of trust running through Folk Bitch Trio’s debut album. Not only in the lyrics, but in the way the three voices move together. This intimacy is rooted in their real-life friendship. Sinclair, Pilkington, and Peverell have known each other since high school and have sung together for the past five years. They harmonise musically and also emotionally, and their deep connection creates space for creative boldness. The conversational lyricism and collaborative vocals reflect the texture of friendship: messy, honest, and safe. Through both humour and vulnerability, the Melbourne-based group conveys a sense of communal catharsis.

Three harmonising voices cutting through gentle strings fill the gap between dark and light. With ‘Now Would Be a Good Time’, Folk Bitch Trio delivers a debut brimming with wit, tenderness, humour, and community. The album feels like a conversation shared between close friends, unfolding late at night, holding space for both laughter and vulnerability.