There’s something about the way Karly Hartzman opens “Reality TV Argument Bleeds” with the image of picking ticks off someone that tells you everything about this record. Not the grossness of it, though that’s there too. It’s the intimacy of the gesture, the way it suggests both care and revulsion, the kind of mundane tenderness that exists in the margins of real relationships. This is Wednesday at their most unguarded, most human.
Bleeds arrives two years after Rat Saw God transformed the Asheville quintet from underground darlings into something approaching indie rock royalty. Where that record felt like a breakthrough, this one feels like a reckoning. The title isn’t metaphorical. Everything here seeps into everything else: memory into fantasy, love into grief, the personal into the political into the purely absurd.
Hartzman has always been a collector of moments, but here her magpie tendencies serve a deeper purpose. The album functions as a kind of emotional archaeology, digging through the sediment of a life lived in small-town North Carolina. There’s the landlord Gary, who gets dentures at 33 after a bar fight gone wrong (the sequel to Twin Plagues‘ “Gary’s”). There’s the high school friend who shared nudes without consent but died before any confrontation could happen. There’s the true crime podcast that becomes “Carolina Murder Suicide,” a song that somehow finds compassion in senseless violence.
These songs act as mirrors, each reflecting some aspect of Hartzman’s own experience back at her. The genius lies in how she uses other people’s stories to tell her own, creating a kind of emotional parallax that reveals depth through shifting perspective.
Musically, Wednesday has never sounded more confident in their contradictions. Producer Alex Farrar captures the band at their most texturally extreme, letting country twang bleed into noise rock sludge, allowing moments of pristine beauty to coexist with walls of distortion. “Wasp” is 86 seconds of pure throat-shredding hardcore, Hartzman screaming about spider webs and mental death. “The Way Love Goes” strips everything back to finger-picked guitar and pedal steel, a breakup song so raw it makes your chest hurt.
The variety isn’t showing off. Each sonic choice serves the emotional content, the way “Townies” erupts into feedback when Hartzman wails the word “died,” or how “Pick Up That Knife” builds from quiet frustration to apoplectic rage over the course of four minutes. These songs are architectural spaces for specific feelings to inhabit.
Fresh off the success of Manning Fireworks, Lenderman could have dominated these tracks, but instead he weaves in and out of the arrangements like smoke, adding colour and texture without overwhelming Hartzman’s narratives. His leads on “Candy Breath” and “Bitter Everyday” are masterclasses in restraint, saying exactly what needs to be said and no more.
The rhythm section of Alan Miller and Ethan Baechtold provides the kind of lived-in chemistry that only comes from years of playing together. They know when to lock in tight and when to let things breathe, when to be the engine and when to be the landscape. Xandy Chelmis’s steel guitar work is particularly vital, adding layers of melancholy that speak to the album’s country DNA without ever feeling nostalgic or precious.
But this is Hartzman’s show, and she’s never been better. Her voice has developed remarkable range and control since the early Wednesday records, capable of tender croons (“Elderberry Wine”), desperate wails (“Townies”), and everything in between. More importantly, she’s learned to use that voice as another storytelling tool, letting cracks and breaks convey meaning as effectively as words.
The lyrics themselves are dense with detail but never cluttered. Hartzman has an uncanny ability to select the exact right image to anchor a song: the pitbull puppy pissing off a balcony, the weeds growing into trampoline springs, the grocery store sushi and motel room keys. These aren’t random, surreal touches, but rather the specific detritus of lived experience, the kind of details that only come from paying attention to the world as it actually is.
There’s darkness here, certainly. Bodies in creeks, murder-suicides, addiction, violence. But Hartzman approaches these subjects with a kind of radical empathy that transforms potential exploitation into genuine compassion. She’s not using other people’s pain for dramatic effect; she’s trying to understand how suffering permeates communities, how trauma resonates across generations.
The personal stakes become clear on songs like “The Way Love Goes” and “Elderberry Wine,” where the dissolution of Hartzman and Lenderman’s romantic relationship casts everything in a different light. These are complex meditations on love’s aftermath, exploring how intimacy can endure the end of romance. “Feel like I’m almost good enough to know you,” Hartzman sings, and the line contains multitudes of doubt, hope, and hard-won self-awareness.
Bleeds is Wednesday’s most cohesive statement, a record that feels both deeply rooted in place and universal in its concerns. It’s the sound of a band that’s figured out exactly what they want to be: chroniclers of American damage, poets of small-town survival, believers in the possibility that art can transform pain into something approaching grace.
The album ends with “Gary’s II,” that story about the landlord and his dentures, Hartzman marvelling at how his teeth stay so white when all he drinks is Pepsi. It’s a perfect encapsulation of Wednesday’s worldview: finding wonder in the mundane, beauty in the broken, reasons to keep going in the face of everything that tries to tear us down. That’s not just great songwriting. That’s a way of living.
Wednesday play Club Soda in Montreal on November 13. BUY TICKETS
Photo Credit: Graham Tolbert
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