Shuffling into our booth, Gracie Sinclair marvels at the drink menu with her big, green, Betty Boop eyes. “Question: Is that a happy hour price?” I assure her $7.00 is the cost of an average cocktail in Portland, Oregon — the 32nd stop of Folk Bitch Trio’s debut world tour. “Old Crow whiskey, Baileys, and coffee topped with whipped cream…” she croons. Her bandmates Jeanie Pilkington and Heide Peverelle nod agreeably. The few rusty patrons at the bar crane their heads at the sound of their Australian lilts. They order tea and orange juice, but reassure me it’s not too early for a beer. “We’re a cheap date,” says Gracie.

I have brought the Melbourne-based outfit to Elliott Smith’s old haunt, My Father’s Place, a dimly lit brick diner straight out of a Lynchian daydream. I gesture over to the red vinyl stool, the one in front of the taps where Elliott used to sit, which piques the interest of Gracie, who’s just divulged her profound preteen kinship with Kurt Cobain. “I love pathetic man music,” she tells me. I’m quick to agree.

I generally avoid caricaturing people, but it’s impossible not to acknowledge the uncanny resemblance between their hairstyles and those of The Powerpuff Girls: Gracie, the shaggy brunette, balances her cheeky theatrics with a shadowy interior life; Jeanie, knowing and composed, radiates a Stevie Nicks intensity from beneath her blonde curtain bangs; and Heide, of course, is the curly, ginger-haired, electrically-amplified powerhouse of the group. Each brings their own creative flavor to create the jouissance of Folk Bitch Trio, being the latest addition to the Jagjaguwar roster — which boasts releases from the likes of Bon Iver, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, and Sharon Van Etten.

Folk Bitch Trio’s instrumental virtuosity and brutally honest songwriting has provided their listeners with a playfully refreshing take on folk music. Refreshing enough that they’ve earned significant attention over recent years, leading them to share stages with both Alex G and King Gizzard. With their first album, Now Would Be a Good Time, debuting last summer, they also launched themselves into the indie spotlight with their first headlining world tour.

These three best friends have written and rehearsed as a band for only six years, but their music reflects a lifelong attunement to each other, their bond stretching back to grade school. “​​I love looking at photos of us when we’re 14,” Jeanie reminisces. “We have no idea.” Their first tours were entirely self-supported, hauling their gear around on trains and staying in sketchy motels, returning home broke and exhausted to slog through their day jobs once again. Those experiences afforded them a deep gratitude for the opportunity of this tour, to actually have a formal band manager, to have put out an album that has made such things possible.

As their name might suggest — it originates from a text Heide had sent to Gracie and Jeanie about starting a “folk bitch trio” — they pull from folk music’s rich storytelling tradition while breathing mischievous life into a genre that’s often been overly sanctified. They are serious but not humorless, and their songwriting is spirited despite their being of a generation best known for its malaise. Phoebe Bridgers once described them as “Boygenius if it was from the ’40s or something,” which requires a serious stretch of imagination. But maybe she’s right?

 “I feel like most of the folk scene is — no shade — filled up with people who have lived a relatively similar experience,” Jeanie says dryly. “I don’t think there’s heaps of experience reflecting early-twenties divas from Melbourne. It’s not the common voice of the folk tradition.” I rack my brain for an Australian folk artist, one they’d consider true-blue; Nick Cave and C.W. Stoneking are the only ones that come to mind. “The type of music we make, it gets digested better in America,” she adds.

Folk is a genre that grows increasingly vaporous the more you try to define it, though Llewyn Davis may have summed it up best: “If it was never new, but never gets old, it’s a folk song.” Let’s agree that it involves lyrically authentic expressions of a particular cultural heritage using acoustic instrumentation, and that is now becoming more distinct and more appealing amid our hyperconnected (yet flattened) postmodern landscape. This craving for authenticity has resulted in a massive folk revival for Gen Z and Zillenials, who’ve become jaded by their fluorescent-lit and tightly cubicled realities. Listening to the likes of Karen Dalton, Jackson C. Frank, Woody Guthrie, Elizabeth Cotten, or Nick Drake suspends us in a charming, antiquated dream that’s free of the gadgets that consume us.

But more importantly, folk reminds us that there’s a throughline to the past that hasn’t been entirely severed by digitization. It turns out people have been longing, hurting, grieving, and falling in love since our very first grunts. The magic of folk is how well it illuminates the universal thread beneath personal stories, no matter the temporal or geographic distance between them. The members of Folk Bitch Trio are not the progeny of coal miners, nor did they suffer through the deprivations of the Dust Bowl. But with an artist’s awareness, they explore the modern condition to create music that’s won them fans the world over.

Heide tells me that Victoria has always offered a backdrop to their lyrical world, but much of their songwriting is grounded in their long hours on the road. Touring around America adds another layer to their perspective; they get to meet the landscapes that have long shaped their influences. “Driving around listening to Gillian Welch…” Gracie swoons, her hands cupping a mug of tea. “America is so massively influential, through film and TV and the books that I’ve read. I’ve spent a lot of time in my mind being here.”

I could venture to guess the folk-bitch mindset, but there is no need. They all start shooting from the hip: gags and laughs, being nice, being aware, working hard and playing harder. But Heide shrugs. “Recently, I’ve been trying to find a phrase to kind of really sum it up: That’s none of my business. That’s none of your business as well. And also, look at me, but don’t look at me.”

Heide’s cryptic treatise sums up a good chunk of Gen Z’s aspirational modus operandi. Witness, but don’t judge.

Portland is cloaked in a wet gray blanket by nightfall, and Folk Bitch Trio is playing yet another sold-out show. Tonight’s venue is Revolution Hall, an old high-school located in East Portland that’s been converted into a multilevel venue. It was only last night that I caught The Brian Jonestown Massacre here. They were still powering through an uncompromising three-hour set when I was forced to surrender just before midnight. I needed to preserve my mojo for tonight, though Heide had reassured me they would not be playing nearly that long.

I bumble around the crowd looking for my friends, while the opener, Alex Amen, takes the stage. Alex is a handsome young Texan in a navy baseball shirt and blue jeans with the perfect fade that vintage stores overcharge you for. His mustache is trimmed, his hair long and brown. He reminds me of a pedestrian in a Stephen Shore photograph as he stands humbly with his guitar, telling us a bit about his time living on an island in Washington. And then he begins to sing.

His voice hits me like a gong, as an impossible swell of sound pours from his mouth. He plays us “This Love of Mine,” and I realize he must be possessed by the ghost of Tim Buckley. His rollicking picking style reflects acute study of the 1960s Greenwich folk scene; Tim Hardin, Pete Seeger, and Fred Neil are smiling down on him from their special place in the sky. 

After Alex’s seance, Jeanie, Gracie, and Heide take the stage to resounding applause. Each of them are clad in their own iteration of black — witchy, gothic, effortlessly cool — and they arrange themselves in a line, provide introductions, and promptly erupt into three-part harmonies powerful enough to form their own center of gravity. 

I ponder the fatefulness of these lifelong friends, each of them individually imbued with the sonic prowess of a siren. Watching them up there, I decide if I were to be reborn with any skill, it’d have to be singing. It must feel good, to have music spilling from their chests like birds. 

As they finish “Foreign Bird,” a gorgeous tune about stepping away from unwanted habits, Gracie trades acoustic duty with Jeanie. “Anyone surprised to find out we’re exotic Australians?” Gracie teases. I’m surprised by all Australians, if I’m being honest; they feel like cousins from an alternate dimension. With Gracie now on guitar, they launch into my favorite of their tracks, “Cathode Ray,” a Jefferson Airplane-esque ballad about loving someone you can’t ever quite get to the center of:

We get home, get the scalpel out

And just for fun

You say, show me what it looks like

When you come undone

Their harmonies descend into this chorus, unlacing with its suggestive spiral — lasting a few beats on “come” until being relieved with “undone.” Gracie sings with her feet in relevé, with the lightness of a dancer on the verge of floating off the ground. There are never more than two guitars playing at a time, Heide leading the electric current while Jeanie and Gracie take turns holding down the acoustic foundation. Afterwards, they pay homage to hometown hero Rowland S. Howard with a cover of “Shivers,” a song he wrote when he was a 16-year-old and playing in The Boys Next Door with Nick Cave.

The set carries us through a good chunk of Now Would Be a Good Time, and in the dim lights of the venue I can see the mouths of the audience singing every song. Heide then indulges the crowd in the story of how they met their opener Alex, which happened to be during their very first Whole Foods experience at the flagship location in Austin. “Gracie sort of pointed and went, ‘Cowboys.’ And, well, it was Alex and a few other cowboys.”

“Sometimes you go in for juice and come out with lifelong friends,” Gracie confirms. Now they’re touring with that very cowboy, thousands of kilometers from home, playing a sold-out show in a city they’ve never before been to. 

It’s been a tight hour and they have one more song left, the lofty “God’s a Different Sword,” a generous ode to growth. And then it is over, with little to no fanfare. The house lights come on and the sound tech’s blasting “Let Me Roll It” before anyone can even try to demand an encore. 

Sue me, but I welcome the streamlined ending; cheers for an encore often feel more like a forced habit than an actual plea. The crowd (and band) is probably more prepared to go home than it cares to admit. But on this night, my musical cup is plenty full. So after they sign every vinyl at the merch booth for a long line of fans, we all head back to My Father’s Place, where I play my worst game of pool yet. 

While they make their shots, I imagine how Portland is impressing itself upon them as newcomers. I love that feeling, of being around fresh eyes in a familiar place. Looking around the bar, we could just as well be anywhere. And I know just the tune for that.