You might not expect an acoustic vocal harmony group to radiate “‘fuck yeah’ rock’n’roll energy” but this is how Melbourne’s Folk Bitch Trio characterise their sound and attitude. In practice, they produce a sometimes spare, sometimes sumptuous, always graceful blend with a lyrical sting in the tail, moving Phoebe Bridgers to describe them as “Boygenius if it was from the ’40s”.
You might not expect an acoustic vocal harmony group to radiate “‘fuck yeah’ rock’n’roll energy” but this is how Melbourne’s Folk Bitch Trio characterise their sound and attitude. In practice, they produce a sometimes spare, sometimes sumptuous, always graceful blend with a lyrical sting in the tail, moving Phoebe Bridgers to describe them as “Boygenius if it was from the ’40s”.
“We just set out to play music together with our means and the feelings in our hearts,” says Gracie Sinclair, “but singing songs in three-part harmony is what we are best at.”
Sinclair and bandmates Heide Peverelle and Jeanie Pilkington were not always folk bitches. “My head was really in the jazz game,” says Sinclair, who studied jazz voice and was performing corporate and club gigs by her mid-teens. Pilkington dropped out of the same course but held on to her love of harmonics. Peverelle dipped in and out of piano lessons, art school and their dad’s record collection. “There was a period of time when I rejected folk music in a really heavy way because I thought it was daggy and uncool,” they say. “Then you get to 17, 18 and think, ‘Whatever I like is cool to me, it doesn’t actually matter.’”
FBT formed in 2019, not long before they were hit by the world’s longest regional lockdown. But their vocal chemistry prevailed. “We were fresh out of school and maybe a little bit directionless and didn’t really want to do anything apart from hang out most days and sing,” says Pilkington. “I felt uninspired during that period, but maybe it was a nice amount of breathing space.”
They’ve spent the last couple of years touring with the likes of M Ward and Julia Jacklin, while consolidating their close harmonies, acoustic arrangements – all three play guitar “but never all at the same time” – and wry lyrics. They describe their songs as “pathetic teen tragedies”, distilled in bewitching yet wicked style on their debut album, Now Would Be A Good Time.
Their individual tastes converge around Rufus Wainwright, Nick Drake, Lucinda Williams and especially the masterful alchemy of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. “Soul Journey was the car soundtrack when I was a kid,” recalls Pilkington. “Before I even had a formulated idea of what it meant to love music, I loved those songs. It’s so real and you can hear the room. All the things I care about now were on the first record that I loved as a kid.”
“They are just the best, with some of the most beautiful singing ever,” agrees Sinclair. “Dave is invisible and that is a marker of a beautiful blend.”
The trio describe their own intertwined vocals as a puzzle to be solved, even chiming around each other in natural harmony as they talk. So how would they define a Folk Bitch? “It’s a love of saying what’s on your mind in music and in life,” says Pilkington. “Unapologetically being earnest and stupid and silly,” adds Sinclair. “A lot of our songs touch on sex and general humiliation,” says Peverelle, “and then we accompany the song with very dainty acoustic guitar.”
“But we take our music as seriously as someone who’s playing heavy rock’n’roll,” concludes Pilkington.
Sinclair sums it up: “The sentiments we want to express are all the things you would be feeling as a 23-year-old – lame, frustrated, heartbroken, excited and overjoyed – and the essence of Folk Bitch Trio is, ‘Fuck everything, this is what we can do.’ And hopefully we’re going to do it as well as we can.”
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