Now Would Be A Good Time
Folk Bitch Trio’s debut album contains several very distinct through lines. “The songs are us experiencing things that we mostly experienced together or with real-life narration of, ‘This is what’s happening in my life,’” guitarist/vocalist Jeanie Pilkington tells Apple Music. “They’re songs that come from our shared brain and heart, and individual brains and hearts.” Given that some were composed during the Melbourne band’s extensive national and overseas touring, adjusting to life on the road is another clear theme, particularly in songs such as “Mary’s Playing the Harp.” “A few of them were written in that transition between \[touring\] not being a part of our lives and starting to tour, and starting to make sense of going to weird places to perform and how that feels,” says Pilkington. Adds guitarist/vocalist Heide Peverelle: “I write a lot on the road and a lot of the songs reference feelings of being on tour.” It was during one of those tours, supporting English songwriter Ben Howard on an Australian and New Zealand run in 2024, that the trio stopped by Auckland’s Roundhead Studios to record “God’s a Different Sword” with producer Tom Healy, who would go on to helm the full record. They were drawn to the studio for its equipment. “They have a tape machine, and we had decided we wanted to work on tape for this record,” says Peverelle. The analog recording accentuates the trio’s astonishingly warm vocal harmonies (all recorded live), which sit atop their dreamy, pastoral folk and occasional flourishes of lo-fi electric guitar. “It’s us on a plate,” says Peverelle. “It feels like our hearts are very open.” Here, Pilkington, Peverelle, and vocalist/guitarist Gracie Sinclair take Apple Music through *Now Would Be a Good Time*, track by track. **“God’s a Different Sword”** Heide Peverelle: “When I brought that to the group to arrange and tweak, it felt like an introduction to how we wanted to go sonically. It’s just about the euphoria and optimism you feel \[at\] the end of a breakup, starting afresh.” Gracie Sinclair: “It signifies that feeling of having your own hands back on the wheel. And you’re like, I’m driving my life now.” **“Hotel TV”** Jeanie Pilkington: “It’s about a relationship going bad. Gracie wrote the hook when we were in a hotel in Brisbane, our first time staying out of Melbourne to do music, needing some rest. We needed a fucking break. It really resonated with the rest of the song, ’cause that’s what I was trying to say—I needed to step away, because I was in this suffocated environment that is that hotel room, but also that relationship.” **“The Actor”** HP: “The story is very true; it’s quite a literal song. When you start dating someone, and even if you’ve been married to someone, \[you can\] still not really know them. I think it’s about that and the mask you wear when you’re in a relationship, and if shit gets hard and it crumbles.” JP: “It’s short and it’s punchy. I think it represents a downward spiral that happens very quickly, before you can even catch yourself.” **“Moth Song”** JP: “People think it’s me talking to my bandmates.” GS: “It’s me talking to myself. I’m Gracie and I’m singing, so I say my own name. ‘Moth Song’ is about losing the plot. It’s about wanting more from the relationships that you have around you and feeling very heartbroken and very alone in that. I was sitting on the train feeling very sorry for myself for some reason, and daydreaming and imagining all these moths filling the train carriage, and that’s what I’m talking about in the chorus—I was imagining the train doors opening and all these moths going up into the sky like confetti. That’s a nice release.” **“I’ll Find a Way (To Carry It All)”** GS: “It’s the closer to the A-side of the record.” JP: “It’s like a breathing point. Originally, we were going to open the record with this because, for a long time, we opened our set with it when we played live—it’s a great way to shut up the room. But it felt a little bit somber to open \[the album\] like that. Now, it’s this really nice point where, if you’re listening on vinyl, it closes out the first side. The B-side of the record is a bit darker and rocks a bit harder.” **“Cathode Ray”** GS: “This was the last song on the record to get finished. It’s about frustration in a relationship, and when you love someone and you feel like you just can’t get through to them. And you really want to and you want to see them come undone.” **“Foreign Bird”** JP: “\[It’s about\] trying to force yourself to do something and then stopping to realize, hang on, why the hell am I doing this, I don’t want to? And just trying to pull yourself out of your own habits.” **“That’s All She Wrote”** HP: “I spent a lot of time in Northeast Victoria and I was really picturing that part of the world when I was writing it. Each verse and chorus feels like it has a time stamp for me—the first verse is a few years ago, and the middle is more recently and again with the last verse. There’s a clear picture in my mind of each scenario \[and\] specific relationships I had.” **“Sarah”** HP: “It’s a breakup song. We really went back and forth about whether it would be on the record ’cause it felt overly earnest. We wanted to really try and bring down the earnestness with the more rocky guitar vibe.” **“Mary’s Playing the Harp”** JP: “It’s a song about being on tour and being heartbroken, and watching a Mary Lattimore set at a festival in Thirroul and thinking about someone I was going to have to see that I really missed, but also was really dreading what that was going to feel like. We did this superlong tour a couple of years ago through regional Australia and it was a real time of peaks and valleys. Some weird experiences, some bad experiences, just trying to figure out how to live on the road and how isolating that can be. A weird thing to experience as a very young woman or femme person, and all those things came into play.”
Breathtaking harmonies and delicate darkness set Folk Bitch Trio apart – read NME's review of the album 'Now Would Be A Good Time'
There’s something incredibly natural and unaffected about the way Folk Bitch Trio make art. From the name down – disarming yet eye-catching – the