If it sounds like the road is its own fateful character on Wednesday’s new album Bleeds, it might have something to do with when and where it took shape. Entering the studio just a month after vocalist Karly Hartzman and guitarist MJ Lenderman broke up, the North Carolina band were recording off the back of an exhaustive touring schedule in support of 2023’s masterful Rat Saw God. In Hartzman’s songs, the road is as slowly pervasive as God’s plan; an escape; a death site; or just what takes you to the bar. On ‘Elderberry Wine’, a deceptively gentle song in which Hartzman drives someone to the airport, her first thought is, “Sweet song is a long con.” You wonder what song’s playing through the car speakers, but the rest of Bleeds makes the point clear. With a couple of stylistic diversions, it no doubt feeds off the gnarly, blazing energy of its predecessor, collaging another tangle of funny, tragic, beautiful stories. But reaching what sounds like a breaking point on the ferocious highlight ‘Wasp’ leads Hartzman to be just as unsparing on the album’s more intimate moments. The band is about to embark on another tour, but Bleeds sounds like the equivalent of pulling over to let out a good scream.
1. Reality TV Argument Bleeds
If you played Rat Saw God to death, the closing image of ‘TV in the Gas Pump’ blaring into the dark is etched into your brain. As soon as the new album’s title and tracklisting was revealed, there was no doubt they’d make it bleed into this opening track, though the way they seep into each other is both thrilling and downright sickening. If ‘TV in the Gas Pump’ was the first song Hartzman has written about being on the road, on ‘Reality TV Argument Bleeds’ it is the ultimate site of destruction, as the song ends with the engine blowing up in the freezing dark. The narrator is lured out of her bed and into the night, bidding for solitude, when the echoes of that reality TV snowball into a stark, punishing realization: “Melting outward like a movie burning from the screen/ You and your broke dick sincerity.” Power chords chug along to the hummable melody, but it’s the distorted notes that bend and pierce outward that bring the song to its boiling point. Then you can barely hear them, overwhelmed by the fuzz and Hartzman’s dizzying conviction.
2. Townies
With Hartzman back in town, ‘Townies’ breezes through in what might be considered Wednesday’s most familiar mode, fun yet devastatingly cathartic – the kind of song every fan can get on board with. But Hartzman deploys what’s also a narratively common premise – the strangeness of coming back home after a long time away – in eerily misshapen ways. The town was ugly to this girl, of course – “You sent my nudes around/ I never yelled at you about it” – but if her howl is anything to go by, what messes with her still is the reason: “Cause you died.” She offers no ounce of sympathy, but finds a kind of solace in her lack of uniqueness – beyond, perhaps, the fact that she left. In lieu of a chorus, she roams along with the main riff, stretching a single word as if gulping down the past.
3. Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)
When ‘Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)’ was released as a single, we learned it was inspired by the story of a friend who had to pull a body out of a creek in West Virginia. But in the context of the album, you start to wonder how the stories might be connected – maybe the guy from ‘Townies’ was also aiming for a sports scholarship. Bleeds continues to lean heavy as the bodies pile up, but more than that, the noise coils around Hartzman – survivor, the one holding on – like a knot in the throat, something like shame.
4. Elderberry Wine
If Bleeds is the perfect driving album, ‘Elderberry Wine’ is like merging into the highway and letting your muscles relax. You’re still at the mercy of an imperfect machine, far from impervious to intrusive thoughts that could end it all right there. But everybody gets along just fine, and music’s rarely sounded so gorgeous. Switching her gaze between those bodies and the endless horizon, it’s not hard for Hartzman’s poetic mind to equate: “Your eyes are the green of tornado sky.” She begins the song by asserting, “Sweet song is a long con,” and before the final chorus, MJ Lenderman and Xandy Chelmis trade sugary licks like the greatest partners in crime.
5. Phish Pepsi
The country twang ‘Elderberry Wine’ turns groovier and more psychedelic on ‘Phish Pepsi’, a drugged-out account of old friends reuniting over a Phish concert and Human Centipede (“Two things I now wish I had never seen”). Dating back to the Guttering EP, here it acts like a zoomed-in version of ‘Townies’, wincing at the absurdity of catching up through a funeral livestream but betraying no particularly strong emotions. “Looks like you’re holding up alright/ But I know it’s sometimes hard to tell,” she sings, muffled and accompanied by a male voice that’s similarly difficult to discern. The trip, though, is easily enjoyable.
6. Candy Breath
Distortion leaks back out as Hartzman spins another deathly scene, juxtaposing the inevitable violence with the brief portrait of a man sweetening his nights with to-go containers. A welcome return to form in the middle of the album, with some ferocious wah-wah soloing to boot.
7. The Way Love Goes
Listeners and critics alike will be quick to single out ‘The Way Love Goes’ as the most strikingly emotional and beautiful song on Bleeds, maybe even the entire Wednesday catalogue. Many will relate it to the dissolution of Hartzman and Lenderman’s romantic relationship, as they did with ‘Elderberry Wine’. But it’s worth stressing just how much personal devastation Hartzman pours out by way of interpolation: though not a cover, it rightly credits Lefty Frizzell and Sanger D. Shafer, co-writers of the Johnny Rodriguez song ‘That’s the Way Love Goes’ that became the title track for records by both Connie Smith and Merle Haggard. Hartzman homes in on the duality of goes: love endures, but leaves you hanging. It is relentless but transient. “Oversold myself/ On the night we met,” she admits, bittering the line from ‘Chosen to Deserve’ about telling your best stories first. Though mostly voice and guitar, it’s Chelmis’ pedal steel that makes her hurt that much louder.
8. Pick Up That Knife
I can’t imagine bearing to write another ‘Bull Believer’ – not quite so soon, anyway – but ‘Pick Up That Knife’ comes closest to emulating its formula, jumping from gritty verse to grungy instrumental swirl, with metaphorical ellipses cutting the song in half. The individual scenes are enervating, blurring the line between comfort and collapse, but following on from the starkness of ‘The Way Love Goes’, the collagist approach puts the listener at a distance. Still, it’s taunting and thrashy, and you just hope no one ends up throwing up at the Wednesday show.
9. Wasp
Now that should get the pit going. Not that it sounds like they care, but if ‘Elderberry Wine’ gave some the impression that Wednesday are watering down their hardcore edges with sweet country worship, ‘Wasp’ is a stylistic diversion in the opposite direction. It quickly exorcises the demons that have been surrounding the singer – the “faceless fear gather[ing] like a mob,” the “sh-sh-sh-sh-shame” – no longer just bracing for battle. On Rat Saw God‘s ‘What’s So Funny’, Chelmis being swarmed hive of yellowjackets was inspiration for absurd humour; here, getting stung by a wasp is a violent awakening, the beginning of a psychological spiral: “I’m stuck down here inside the lift/ I’m sick, can’t fuck, push the paint around/ Castrated in my mental death.” There’s nothing funny about it, but you can mosh to it, sure.
10. Bitter Everyday
‘Bitter Everyday’ not only sounds anthemic, but its story amounts to a kind of thesis for Hartzman’s entire brand of songwriting: “The sweetest parts of life keep getting bitter everyday.” Though she sings different variations of that line through the song’s fuzzed-up storms, she reserves this most pointed one for its acoustic outro, determined to let it ring out. You learn what the con is, but want to listen to the song again regardless.
11. Caroline Murder Suicide
“God’s plan unfolds so slow,” Hartzman screams on ‘Wasp’, but it’s not until ‘Caroline Murder Suicide’ that the whole band really surrenders to the slowness. Before the familiar elements creep in, it’s Ethan Baechtold’s enveloping bass and twinkly piano setting the mood. Hartzman is as sharp of a writer as an observer of tragedy as she is in embodying it, delivering some of her best lines with an intimacy that could wrench your heart. I’ll spare you the details, but when she sings, “I wondered if grief could break you in half,” it sounds more like a feeling than a thought – one that, unlike the bodies rotting away, could seemingly linger in the air forever.
12. Gary’s II
‘Gary’s’, the song from Wednesday’s 2021 album Twin Plagues, wasn’t really about Gary, Hartzman’s late landlord, a kind man with a lot of crazy stories to tell. Wednesday collaborator Colin Miller writes affectingly about him in his latest album Losin’, but ‘Gary’s II’, despite starting pretty wistfully, isn’t quite mired in grief. It just captures his undyingly youthful spirit through the story of how he ended up getting dentures at 33 after getting hit in the face by a baseball bat. The last word on the album, dryly yet fittingly, is Pepsi, the only drink mentioned in more than one song on the album. One that definitely does not age like any kind of wine; doesn’t rot like most things once living. Not-so-arguably better than “piss-colored Fanta.” No matter how long it stays in the fridge, it always burns down your throat. And it’s always sweet. What a con.
