UCLA Radio’s Rising Artist Spotlight aims to highlight upcoming artists who have demonstrated unique creativity and talent through their music. Through interviews and features, we delve into their journey, influences, and aspirations, giving listeners a glimpse into the future of music.
Folk Bitch Trio is a name that stops you as you hear it on the cusp of someone’s tongue passing by a cafe. Are they truly folk or a riot grrl band erupting in the new age? When you sit down to hear their words, you start to understand their true form. On songs like “The Actor,” you hear acoustics mixed with cuss words mixed with feelings and you start to understand why. UCLA Radio got to chat over email with the band to get more insights into Folk Bitch Trio and their being.
Do you feel like the folk label helps you, or sometimes limits how people perceive your music?
The folk label absolutely influences how people perceive and receive our music. For some it can be a deterrent or the open door. Our name was never a discussion, we started playing music together for fun and ‘Folk Bitch Trio’ was a descriptor, not a title. The ‘bitch’ in our name does a similar thing perhaps…
You mention that the album was written super fragmentally. How did you weave the songs together from different periods of your life? Did it come naturally or did you have to really sew them together?
We wrote these songs separately over a couple of years. Our lives are so intertwined and we write with each other in mind so it was easy and natural to bring the songs together in LP form.
Folk music as many know it is deeply tied to American history and tradition. How do you bring Melbourne/Naarm into that lineage and root your sound locally?
Folk music has a vast historical influence from all over the world and we live in a time where we have access to so much music from so many eras and places. All we can do is draw from what is around us and translate it into something hopefully coherent. The Naarm music scene is thriving and is something truly special. We’re lucky to have played around the world and to have experienced varying scenes but there’s something about the music coming out of our home city that you can’t really find anywhere else.
Because tape captures imperfection and intimacy, did people hear your demos differently than they might’ve if they were digital—like more ‘finished’ rather than ‘rough’?
The use of tape is both an aesthetic sonic choice and a choice we made out of wanting to be extra present in the studio. When we were tracking the record there were no computers in the room. It might sound pretentious but it really worked for us and aided in our dedication to the LP. These days it’s very easy to emulate the tape sound and overdub ‘imperfections’ etc but for our first record we wanted it to sound like you were in the room with us at the kitchen table. That’s where the band started and we wanted to share that.
Most memorable audience moment on tour?
Having an audience sing our songs back to us has been the most surreal experience for us.
How does it feel to be compared to bands such as boygenius? Do you feel honored? Does it take away from your individuality and who you are as a trio?
We mostly feel like it’s a bit of a lazy comparison. All respect to boygenius, but we can’t help but wonder if people would make the same comparison about all male bands. Our music is sonically quite different to boygenius so it feels like people just make the comparison because we’re both bands of three femme people.
The word ‘bitch’ has been weaponized against women for decades, but it can also be reclaimed as a badge of power or defiance. When you first chose the name it was one-off comment, but do you ascribe more meaning to it now?
The name really was a passing comment that was used to describe the type of music we would make. That hasn’t really changed. We’ve always noted the significance of the word bitch but it’s not something we choose to focus on. It’s more about the music.
What’s next??
We’re keen to just keep touring, writing music, work hard and have fun doing it.
Listen to Folk Bitch Trio and their latest work here!
