By Jessica Thrasher, Copy Editor

[Dead Oceans; 2025]

Rating: 8/10 

Key tracks: “Townies,” “Elderberry Wine,” “Bitter Everyday”

Wednesday is a trifecta of indie, alt-rock and folk music from Asheville, North Carolina. The band has been making music for eight years now, and has stolen the hearts of many with their mix of exploratory instrumental talent and deeply carved, environmentally-driven lyricism. 

Wednesday began with frontwoman, guitarist and principal songwriter Karly Hartzman who started the project as a solo endeavor and has since collected and lost members until landing on four others with which to record Bleeds: Ethan Baechtold on piano and bass on guitar, Xandy Chelmis on lap steel and pedal steel, Alan Miller on drums, and established musician MJ Lenderman on guitar. MJ Lenderman is an in-studio band member as of this February, when he announced he would no longer be touring with Wednesday. This announcement followed Lenderman and Hartzman’s split after a six-year relationship.

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“Reality TV Argument Bleeds” is a tone setter that has us sit right back down despite the post-summer listlessness that is felt this time of year. Catharsis and trepidation in equal measure sets Bleeds off running out the gate. This is followed by “Townies,” and we are led in the familiar “countrygaze” direction to which Wednesday has made their partiality clear. “Townies” and “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)” both illustrate the stagnant people you gather in a lifetime: old friends and classmates, weirdos, townies. People that seemed not to move in the past five years. Fortunately, this means you always know where to find them. 

“Elderberry Wine” radiates warmth and impending heartache. The accompanying music video was Bleeds’ strongest yet, set in a dive bar manned by Hartzman with all its impatient patrons of the Carolina south. The affectionate picture painted by Hartzman, a self-proclaimed “Carolina Girl,” is of both the place and former partner, MJ Lenderman.  

“The Way Love Goes” is the sound of the nerves being stripped from your heart when a shred of love still exists for someone you’re leaving. “Pick Up That Knife” pushes carelessness to the forefront of the mind and disaster to the helm. Reaching a scream by the end, Hartzman tells: “When you pick up that knifе, you were askin’ for a fight/ Mouthed off to those bikers at a vacant stoplight/ They’ll meet you outside, they’ll meet you outside.”  

“Wasp” is a tear through Wednesday’s punk artery, whose sound isn’t a prominent influence in all of Wednesday’s work, and is especially scarce on much of Bleeds, but is ever-present in some amount with the sudden grit the tracks tend to take on. This is a quick, violent tear through punk that returns to meet “Bitter Everyday,” a return to familiar, sun-warmed countrygaze. The track is complemented by a lake day music video complete with a sweet, little dog, Espolón from the bottle, and friends doing lazy backstrokes after jumping off the pontoon boat.

The album closes with “Gary’s II,” a folky, sardonic retelling of a man losing his teeth to a misunderstanding and a baseball bat in the parking lot of a dive bar. This is an endearing, whiskey driven, funny little hat to put on top of Bleeds.

The breakup coinciding with the making of Bleeds made for an enigmatic marriage of skillful collaboration throughout the band and soul-bearing on Hartzman’s behalf, which, according to her, has made it “The most Wednesday album yet.” Tragically, Hartzman’s vocal depth and ferocity complement Lenderman’s melodic lines extraordinarily well. On “Elderberry Wine” and “The Way Love Goes,” she said to NPR, “I wrote both of those songs for my at-the-time partner and collaborator, Jake Lenderman. He plays guitar on this record. The songs knew before I knew myself that that relationship was ending. By the time I wrote ‘The Way Love Goes,’ I was accepting that we weren’t going to end up together, for all the reasons people don’t usually end up together.”

Bleeds has some stake in Hartzman’s relationship with Lenderman, as well as other romances from her past. Ultimately, though, the album is a bigger-picture mosaic made of details from her own life and the lives of her friends, her North Carolinian neighbors, and a few lovers. Wednesday has yet again engrossed and deeply charmed me with what has been brought to the table.

Rat Saw God was Wednesday’s fourth album and widely regarded as what put them on the map, and Bleeds is working to see that they stay there. If Rat Saw God was Wednesday’s dark and stormy night, Bleeds must be their light of day. Bleeds seems to have promised Wednesday a lasting niche and point of recognition as a knock-out band that has been a defining point of alternative sound in the 2020s thus far.