Folk Bitch Trio — the Naarm/Melbourne-based band of Gracie Sinclair (she/her), Jeanie Pilkington (she/her) and Heide Peverelle (they/them) — today present ‘Hotel TV‘, the final single/video from their debut album, Now Would Be A Good Time, out this Friday via Jagjaguwar. LISTEN + WATCH HERE + PRE-SAVE THE LP HERE.

‘Hotel TV‘ follows last month’s ode to unrequited love, ‘Moth Song‘, described by Stereogum as “lush” and hailed by Hearing Things as “a gorgeous soundscape.” In keeping with Now Would Be A Good Time’s chronicling of the brutally familiar moments at the end of relationships, ‘Hotel TV‘ is a hypnotic, late-night reverie about “having a sex dream about somebody else while next to your partner,” explains Pilkington. At the song’s conclusion Pilkington sings: “Cause I lay beside him / In the night / And I had a filthy dream / To the noise of the hotel TV.”

Jeanie continues, “Hotel TV speaks to how unsettling it is when you feel the first signs of a love going a bit rotten. I was inspired by those low budget ads that you get from local businesses when you’re in a niche country town. It’s also about being in love with a liar. I wrote the bulk of the song and Gracie wrote the hook, ‘can I get some rest’, when we were sleep deprived in a hotel in Brisbane. Our vibe check for the music video was dire country town, bored and cheeky, loosely inspired by both our childhoods and what we’ve had to do for fun touring regional Australia.” 

WATCH: Hotel TV (Official Video)

Folk Bitch Trio’s music sounds familiar, built on a foundation of the music they’ve loved throughout their lives–gnarled Americana, classic rock, piquant, and clear-eyed balladry. Yet the songs are modern and youthful, bound by all the petty resentments and minor humiliations of being in your early twenties in the 2020s. As proclaimed by the Sydney Morning Herald on their album debut: “It’s funny, a bit horny, and still deeply confessional… A set of songs that feel like stories being shared from one friend to another, deep into the night. For 10 exquisite tracks, you get to join that inner circle”; and The Australian: “With their confiding lyrics and vocals alike, these three Melbourne musicians strike a chord by singing together as an age-old conduit for emotional release.”

Folk music has a bad habit of being presented as a deathly serious concern. It’s the music you cry to, it’s overly sacred, it’s solemnly considered by critic-historians. But Folk Bitch Trio 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, workshopped on tour and written specifically with their shared connection in mind, their album debut is built on minimalist, idiosyncratic arrangements with voices and guitar taking centre stage. A manual for modern living from three proud Folk Bitches finding beauty and wisdom where they can, together.

Now Would Be A Good Time is funny and darkly ironic, previewed already with the tense, emotionally volatile torch song ‘The Actor‘; the bodily and human anxiety fuelled ‘Cathode Ray‘; and the sly innuendo of ‘God’s A Different Sword‘ nodding to the clichéd, over-referenced millennial self-help book. 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. “But for me at least, when I looked into the future, it was this relatively mysterious thing.” Joining forces as a group demystified that future. That feeling—of music as an innate calling, as opposed to hobby or folly—was justified.

Affirming their position includes a steady stream of accolades as cover stars on NME Magazine to Spotify‘s Fresh Finds; breakout debuts across BIGSOUND, SXSW Austin, The Great Escape and world tours built off singles alone; the approval of Phoebe Bridgers (“Boygenius if it was from the 40’s or something”), theneedledrop and triple j‘s Unearthed Feature Artist amongst crowds for supports as disparate as King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Alex G and Julia Jacklin. Folk Bitch Trio are excited to embark on a headline tour across Australia and New Zealand this September, while they celebrate their album release with select headline shows in the US across July and August amongst dates supporting Whitney. For more information, see HERE.