The Downtown Seattle Association is proud to present Downtown Summer Sounds concert series, bringing free live music to downtown Seattle for over 45 years. Catch 17 outdoor concerts featuring local, national and international bands across downtown from July 9-Aug. 28 — check out the full lineup!

The Downtown Summer Sounds concert series is funded by the Metropolitan Improvement District ratepayers

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Folk B*tch Trio

Folk music has a bad habit of being presented as a deathly serious concern. It’s something you cry

to, it’s overly sacred, it’s solemnly considered by critic-historians. But Folk Bitch Trio, former high school

friends Heide Peverelle (they/them), Jeanie Pilkington (she/her) and Gracie Sinclair (she/her), 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, their debut album, 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.

“Cathode Ray” opens with caution, its first harmonies arriving in big, looping sighs. It’s vulnerable but a

little menacing, with a wide open chorus and a spacious, airy beat anchoring everything. “Moth Song”, a

song about unrequited love and “being so spun out by everything that you feel like you’re delusional and

hallucinating crazy things,” forms the album’s spare centrepiece, Anita Clark’s undulating violin part

drifting in and out of focus as if from a dream.

Other songs aren’t as oblique, instead chronicling brutally familiar moments at the end of relationships:

The tense, emotionally volatile torch song “The Actor”, says Peverelle, is about “going to your partner’s

one-woman show and then getting broken up with”. “Hotel TV”, a hypnotic, late-night reverie, is about

“having a sex dream about somebody else while next to your partner, and your partner being a liar,”

explains Pilkington.

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.