Can a self-portrait be a collage? Can empathy be autobiographical? What’s the point of living if we’re not trying to understand all the horror and humor that surrounds everything? These are a few of the questions lurking under the bleachers of Wednesday’s new album 'Bleeds', an intoxicating collection of narrative-heavy Southern rock that—like many of the most arresting passages from the North Carolina band’s highlight reel so far—thoughtfully explores the vivid link between curiosity and confession.

'Bleeds' is not only the best Wednesday record—it’s also the most Wednesday record, a patchwork-style triumph of literary allusions and outlaw grit, of place-based poetry and hair-raising noise. Karly Hartzman—founder, frontwoman, and primary lyricist—credits Wednesday’s tightened grasp on their own identity to time spent collaborating on previous albums, plus a tour schedule that’s been both rewarding and relentless. “'Bleeds' is the spiritual successor to 'Rat Saw God', and I think the quintessential ‘Wednesday Creek Rock’ album,” Hartzman said, articulating satisfaction with the ways her band has sharpened its trademark sound, how they’ve refined the formula that makes them one of the most interesting rock bands of their generation. “This is what Wednesday songs are supposed to sound like,” she said. “We’ve devoted a lot of our lives to figuring this out—and I feel like we did.”

Just like 'Rat Saw God', one of the defining rock & roll records of the 2020s so far, 'Bleeds' came together at Drop of Sun in Asheville and was produced by Alex Farrar, who’s been recording the band since 'Twin Plagues'. Hartzman again brought demos to the studio, where she and her bandmates—Xandy Chelmis (lap steel, pedal steel), Alan Miller (drums), Ethan Baechtold (bass, piano), and Jake “M.J.” Lenderman (guitar)—worked as a team to bulk-up the compositions with the exact right amounts of country truth-telling, indie-pop hooks, and noisy sludge. More than ever, the precise proportions were steered by the lyricism—not only its tone or subject matter, but also the actual sound of the words, as well as Hartzman’s masterfully subjective approach to detail selection. Every image or scene is filtered through Hartzman’s agile, writerly brain. The particulars deemed essential all contain revelations about Hartzman’s specific obsessions and vulnerabilities, about the fragmented way she processes the world. Maybe sometimes the best way to locate truth or pain or dignity within your own life story, Bleeds suggests, is by crawling into someone else’s.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: To me, while Wednesday's music has all of the evocative charm and quiet thoughtfulness of a country record, there is little to tie Wednesday's southern American roots to their sound, an incendiary mix of snarling grunge rock and sweeping stadium grandiosity. 'Bleeds' is another superb record from Wednesday and a perfect fit for Dead Oceans' off-piste aesthetic.

TRACK LISTING

1. Reality TV Argument
2. Bleeds
3. Townies
4. Wound Up Here (By
Holdin On)
5. Elderberry Wine
6. Phish Pepsi
7. Candy Breath
8. The Way Love Goes
9. Pick Up That Knife
10. Wasp
11. Bitter Everyday
12. Carolina Murder Suicide
13. Gary’s II

In 2021 Douglas Dulgarian of the band TAGABOW issued the very first cassette release on his brand new label project Julia’s War Recordings. It was a collaborative EP by friends Jake and Karly called Guttering, issued under their pseudonyms MJ Lenderman & Wednesday. Upon it’s initial release, Stereogum put it perfectly when they said that “Guttering‘s six self-recorded tracks present some of the best aspects of both artists’ work, setting sighing harmonies against dense power chords and occasionally seasoning the mix with some twangy lead guitar.”

Fast forward to 2025, MJ Lenderman and Wednesday are two of the biggest names in indie rock. Wednesday had a break out 2023 with the release of their excellent Dead Oceans debut ‘Rat Saw God’, which landed on a numerous year end lists. In 2024 MJ Lenderman released his Anti debut with ‘Manning Fireworks’, which catapulted him into indie stardom. A string of sold out tour dates and an equally impressive list of year end accolades followed the album’s release. With both bands garnering rabid fanbases over the last four years, the release of this early collaborative EP demonstrates just how far the two have come, and showcases the magical spark the two had in those early days before the world was watching.

TRACK LISTING

1. Big Money
2. Terminex
3. Phish Pepsi (ft. Advance Base)
4. My Voice Is A Little Horse
5. Sacrifice (For Love)
6. Christiane F

‘Paint It Black’ performed by Nevermore Academy star pupil, Wednesday Adams. Her debut release. Expect more from this talented young musician.

“The version of ‘Paint It Black’ played by Wednesday on her cello has a unique dark energy that fascinated fans.” - auralcrave.com

TRACK LISTING

Paint It Black - Wednesday Addams
Wednesday Main Titles - Danny Elfman

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/ vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din.

Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything.

The songs on Rat Saw God don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.”

But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

TRACK LISTING

01. Hot Grass Smell
02. Bull Believer
03. Got Shocked
04. Formula One
05. Chosen To Deserve
06. Bath County
07. Quarry
08. Turkey Vultures
09. What’s So Funny
10. TV In The Gas Pump

In a long and emotionally exhausting year of being inside (alone, in my case,) I have found myself thinking about mirrors. How to avoid spending too much time in them, most days. Taking inventory of the real, physical self is difficult work, work that I’m not entirely opposed to but work that became immediately more treacherous for me when I had to witness the very real toll that time, modern anxieties, isolation, and boredom were taking on me. It was easier, it seemed, to spiral into a not-so-distant glorious past, to use memory as a tool of both excitement and healing. But, speaking of excitement, I like to stumble towards a band with no agenda, no purpose, uncovering sound almost on accident. This is how I first heard Wednesday. The band came to me and I don’t remember how, or why. They simply arrived, as if we’d been traveling toward each other our whole lives.

I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone soaked into my summer of 2020, and in sound, in spirit, in central concerns and the execution of them, it took me back to an era before the current era, which I’d needed at the time. The past can feel less hellish than the present if we are, sometimes, not fully honest with ourselves. There is the trick of nostalgia that I spend a lot of time playing with in my own writing, and somewhat tormented by in my own living. The very real idea that nostalgia is both a useful tool and also a weapon if it isn’t paired with something that approaches a type of rigorous honesty.

But if I may go back to all of these ideas of nostalgia and our old, tricky, past selves that are, indeed, a part of the house of bricks that make up our present self, what I also hope you, listener, might adore about this album is the exact moment at the start of “The Burned Down Dairy Queen” when Karly sings I was hiding in a room in my mind / and I made me take a look at myself. Because if you, like me, have been avoiding mirrors – both metaphorical and real – this is where the album becomes a lighthouse, echoing bright across the darkness of my otherwise dark and empty chambers.

So much of these songs meditate on the past in far less romantic ways than I have found myself meditating on the past, and I was desperate for the recalibration that this album provided. So, yes, the songs are good. You will maybe roll down your windows on a comfortable day on the right stretch of road in a warm season and turn the volume up when “Birthday Song” gets good and loud and singalong-able. You might sit atop a rooftop at night, closer to the moon than you were on the ground, and let “Ghost Of A Dog” churn and rattle you to some nighttime realization that you couldn’t have had in silence. But, even on top of all of this, on top of all the pleasures and the mercies that the sounds on this album might afford. I hope and think, too, that it will remind anyone who listens that we are a collection of many reflections. All of them deserving patience. —Hanif Abdurraqib

TRACK LISTING

1) Twin Plagues
2) Handsome Man
3) The Burned Down Dairy Queen
4) Cliff
5) How Can You Live If You Can’t
Love How Can You If You Do
6) Cody’s Only
7) Toothache
8) Birthday Song
9) One More Last One
10) Three Sisters
11) Gary’s
12) Ghost Of A Dog

I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone is Wednesday’s second full length album & first as a full band. The Asheville, NC quintet (guitarist/ vocalist Karly Hartzman, lead guitarist Daniel Gorham, pedal steel guitarist Xandy Chelmis, bassist Margo Schultz & drummer Alan Miller) maximizes the dark dissonance of a three guitar attack to highlight the emotionality of Hartzman’s bell-clear vocals & wisps of half-recalled memories & literary references that make up her lyrics.

I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone’s eight songs meld elements of shoegaze, grunge, indie pop & southern American culture into a uniquely personal style of modern rock music that resonates with power & tenderness. The ever-darkening & deepening of Wednesdays’ sound on I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone owes a debt of influence to The Swirlies, Arthur Russell, Red House Painters, Tenniscoats, Ana Roxanne, Acetone, & their continued collaboration with MJ Lenderman (who lends backing vocals to the songs “Billboard” & “November”).

I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone was recorded at Hartzman’s home with engineering assistance from her roommate Colin Miller. The depth & clarity of the recordings balance the distorted volume of Wednesday’s live performances with the intimacy of Hartzman’s voice. Her words hold the center of the chaos, unobscured by the power of the band. Hartzman describes her lyrics as “attempts to access old personal memories & do them justice through prose, with inspiration from the writings of Richard Brautigan, Flannery O’Connor, David Berman & Tom Robbins, & movies like Steel Magnolias.”

TRACK LISTING

1) Fate Is…
2) Billboard
3) Love Has No Pride (Condemned)
4) Underneath
5) November
6) Maura
8) Coyote
9) Revenge Of The Lawn

Typical pop-punk from the West Coast, Death On Wednesday cite influences as diverse as The Beatles and Elvis to The Cult. They couple pulverizing guitar riffs with a solid rhythmic backbone and add a Morrissey soundalike on vocals.

Their 1964 totally acoustic debut still has the freshness of youth and their folk roots influnces on many of the tracks. This features the original "The Sound Of Silence" and is now remastered with three extra tracks.