This week's PBS Feature Album is Now Would Be A Good Time, the debut album from Naarm group Folk Bitch Trio.
Former high school friends Heide Peverelle, Jeanie Pilkington and Gracie Sinclair have a shared sense of humour that is embedded deep in their music, and that sets it alight, safe from the self-serious traps of the genre. Now Would Be A Good Time tells vivid, visceral stories, and is funny and darkly ironic in the manner of writers like Mary Gaitskill or Otessa Moshfegh. Their music sounds familiar, but the songs are modern, youthful, singing acutely through dissociative daydreams and galling breakups, sexual fantasies and media overload, all the petty resentments and minor humiliations of being in your early twenties in the 2020s.
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. 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 (Bon Iver, Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten, UMO and others), and they’ve found their first diehard fans with dazzling harmonies and acerbic lyricism that transcend genre expectations and audience lines.
These are the stakes: Learning how to live a life free of lovesickness and loser exes, when to sink into contemporary nihilism and when to have a laugh with your friends, and why being alive can feel so ephemeral and unreal. In this sense, Now Would Be A Good Time feels like a manual for modern living: a missive from three proud Folk Bitches finding beauty and wisdom where they can, together.
Tune in all this week to hear tracks from Now Would Be A Good Time and PBS Members have the chance to win a copy of the album on vinyl: simply email your name and membership number to before midnight Sunday August 3.
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TOP TRACKS WE'RE LOVING THIS WEEK
Kee'ahn - 'Heavy'
Logic1000 & George Riley - 'i couldn't hold back'
Astralure - 'SM v1.1'
FAMILI - 'Firekeeper'
Samora Pinderhughes - 'Hold Fast'
Command D & Zara - 'The Fog'
Yung Lemon - 'Colonial Culture'
L Lewis - 'Undertow' (Space Ghost Remix)
Namazu - 'For Those In Peril // Hold Back The Night' (Excerpt)
David Craven & Jon S Williams - 'Heart Full'
