In Raymond Carver’s 1983 short story “A Small, Good Thing,” a boy gets hit by a car on his birthday while eating potato chips with his friend. “He fell on his side with his head in the gutter and his legs out in the road,” Carver writes. “His eyes were closed, but his legs moved back and forth as if he were trying to climb over something.” The boy’s mother cancels the birthday party she’d scheduled for later that day, and the boy is soon hospitalized with a mild concussion. Despite what the doctor deems a one-in-a-million circumstance, the boy dies from a hidden occlusion. After receiving the news and heading home in complete dejection, the boy’s parents get a call from a baker, who says that the birthday cake they ordered last week and forgot to cancel is ready for pick-up. Looking for somewhere to divert their anger, the parents get in the car with the intention of killing the baker.
Karly Hartzman’s lyricism evokes similar feelings of absurd despair, often grounded in banal incidents yet told with florid, intricate detail. The Wednesday frontwoman is a maven of the mise en scene. Her penchant for crafting highly specific scenery could induct her into the pantheon of great American short story authors. It’s a throughline connecting the group’s early work to their modern day: the titular burned-down Dairy Queen on 2021’s Twin Plagues, the friend who needs to get his stomach pumped after an accidental Benadryl overdose on 2023’s “Chosen to Deserve,” the narrator who falls for someone at the Texaco pump on 2020’s “Coyote.”
On Bleeds, the indie rock outfit’s latest album, darkness and humor uplift each other, with Hartzman’s pen amplifying them both. There’s the narrator on “Townies” whose nudes get shared without her consent by a now-dead high school ex; the pitbull puppy “pissin’ off a balcony” in “Wound Up Here (by Holdin On);” the band’s multi-instrumentalist Xandy Chelmis vomiting in a Death Grips pit on “Pick Up That Knife.” The tragicomic takes a leading role on the band’s sixth album, which showcases its core songwriter sharpening her keen sensibilities as a preternaturally gifted raconteur. With more eyes and ears on Wednesday than ever, they don’t reinvent themselves for further mass appeal. Instead, Bleeds sees them truck ahead to refine their proven prowess.
When Wednesday captured the world’s attention with 2023’s Rat Saw God, it marked the kind of breakthrough that turned them from an underground staple into indie rock luminaries. Suddenly, Hartzman became the voice of a generation, not long before the band’s lead guitarist (and Hartzman’s ex-partner) Jake “MJ” Lenderman achieved a similar feat with last year’s Manning Fireworks. But whereas Lenderman almost exclusively leaned into Wednesday’s twangier stylings, Hartzman has doubled down on Sonic Youthian squalor while still injecting her fair share of country-fried zest.
The diptych of “Phish Pepsi” and “Candy Breath” is among the best examples of Wednesday’s double-sided mix of rowdy shoegaze and Southern pluck. The former removes any semblance of “gaze” from “countrygaze” as it goes full-on honky tonk: sprightly guitar takes center stage before ceding to Hartzman’s lyrics about watching “a Phish concert and human centipede, two things I now wish I had never seen.” The latter opens with some harmonic scrapes and distant feedback, but it explodes halfway through the first verse, channeling the quiet-loud dynamics of Pixies and the enveloping, swoonworthy guitar tones of my bloody valentine. Fellow Asheville legend Alex Farrar reprises his production role from Rat Saw God, retaining that album’s punchiness on texturally dense songs like “Candy Breath” and “Wasp” while letting the grimy lo-fi of their earlier releases seep into the mix of more subdued moments like “Carolina Murder Suicide” and “The Way Love Goes.”
Elsewhere, Wednesday’s influences materialize in novel ways, such as on the 90-second thrasher “Wasp,” a blistering punk track certain to incite mosh pits galore. Hartzman screams the whole thing, adopting the larynx-shredding shriek that she employed in Rat Saw God’s “Bull Believer” for an entire song. Closing track “Gary’s II,” a sequel to the penultimate Twin Plagues cut “Gary’s”, shuffles into a classic country groove, the tried-and-true train beat, while Chelmis contributes warm splashes of lap steel and Hartzman regales us with the story of how her titular landlord ended up with dentures at age 33. Shortly thereafter, she stops to marvel at how Gary’s teeth are so nice when the only thing he drinks is Pepsi, a beverage that seemingly gets more name drops across Bleeds than in Addison Rae’s big hit (no joke: it pops up on multiple songs). “Elderberry Wine” is a gorgeous, heartbreaking ode to lost love, complete with whining pedal steel. Its narrator mourns cherished memories as much as they hope to create new ones, and Hartzman’s poignant delivery encapsulates that duality when she sings one of the year’s most indelible lines: “But everybody gets along just fine / ‘cause the champagne tastes like elderberry wine.”
Their varied sonic outgrowths coalesce in “Townies,” which features an ensemble cast of characters that our protagonist checks in on to see what we’ve missed in their time away, all soundtracked by squealing, fuzzed guitars, Ethan Baechtold’s gritty bassline, and Alan Miller’s boisterous drums. Its mix of mordant wit and slice-of-life observation bring to mind the indie game Night in the Woods, right down to a scene with a rural bonfire and underage drinking, underscored with that same balance of levity and decay. “Death is around at every point,” she recently told The Guardian. “If you don’t acknowledge that, you’re lying.” By her own metric, she’s one of the most honest songwriters around.
Maybe that’s why Hartzman treats death like a recurring character. “Carolina Murder Suicide” centers on a narrative Hartzman heard while listening to a true crime podcast; “Wound Up Here (by Holdin On)” details a drowning victim who’s memoralized by “a dirty jersey in a trophy case;” “Phish Pepsi” includes a passing mention of a “livestream of a funeral.” But, like any excellent storyteller (and unlike most true crime podcasts), Hartzman grants the dead and dying agency, making it harder for us to view these tragedies from the comfortable, voyeuristic remove we so often depend on. Wednesday’s songs are rooted in the understanding that even minor occurrences are rife with emotional resonance—that every small story functions as a prismatic Rorschach test, reflecting a funhouse mirror image of the listener’s own life back to them as they hear it. And on Bleeds, that idea shines through more than ever.
Read our recent cover story with Wednesday here.
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.
