FEATURE: Spotlight: Wednesday — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Wednesday

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IF you are in North America…

and can see the band perform, I would suggest you catch Wednesday. Their new album, Bleeds, must go down as one of the best of the year. I am a little late to the band, like I am with so many, as I know they have a large fanbase that has been growing for years. The North Carolina band consists of Karly Hartzman (vocals, guitar), MJ Lenderman (guitar, backing vocals), Xandy Chelmis (pedal steel), Alan Miller (drums) and Ethan Baechtold (bass). I am going to end with a review of Bleeds. There are a few interviews from this year that I am including first. In June, The Guardian spoke with Wednesday’s lead, Karly Hartzman. A band known for songs “full of arson, sex shops and outcasts”, the North Carolina-based lead discussed life in the band and revealed a bit about Bleeds:

“Although Pitchfork declared Wednesday “one of the best indie-rock bands around”, Hartzman keeps a low profile in her home town, the small North Carolina city of Greensboro. She recently moved back from nearby Asheville, where she lived on a bucolic property known as Haw Creek that was home to various local musicians. In person, Hartzman is thoughtful, expressive and more reserved than you might expect from her riotous performances.

As we drive around Greensboro, she points out her teenage haunts, such as the cafe she used to frequent when she skipped school. As a kid, she resented being told what to do, but never let that get in the way of an education. “I was very methodical,” she says about cutting class. “I was writing and reading and doing work – I was doing my own school, on my terms.”

She credits her taste in music to a few crucial sources: her parents, who played Counting Crows and the singer-songwriter Edwin McCain around the house; her older sister, who got her into Warped tour punk (Paramore were an early favourite); and a longtime friend who introduced her to shoegaze and post-hardcore bands such as My Bloody Valentine and Unwound.

When she started college, Hartzman admired her friends who played in bands, but she wasn’t interested in taking music lessons. Then she saw the band Palberta – a playful indie-rock trio whose members traded instruments every few songs – and felt inspired by the messy, uncomplicated style of playing the three women shared. “They were doing something that sounded awesome and very easy,” she says. “After that show, I bought my friend’s guitar off him.”

Hartzman’s earliest recordings were solo; she got a formal band together only when her sister asked her to perform at her birthday party. From there, Wednesday rotated through a few members before settling into a stable lineup: Xandy Chelmis on steel guitar, Ethan Baechtold on bass and piano, Alan Miller on drums and MJ Lenderman on guitar. They started playing house shows and tiny spots with friends’ bands and folks they met in local DIY scenes.

Wednesday’s shows could be raucous, rowdy affairs, but their home lives centred around the quietude of Haw Creek, surrounded by streams and open fields – the kind of place where they could go fishing in the morning, then practice in the living room later on. “We lived on acres of land,” she says. “Nothing will ever beat that.”

Hartzman lived at Haw Creek with Lenderman who, alongside his work in Wednesday, found meteoric success last year for his fourth solo album, Manning Fireworks. He and Hartzman started dating before Lenderman joined Wednesday – Hartzman was a fan of his music, playing it over the speakers at the coffee shop where she worked before they met.

After six years together, they broke up amicably in 2024. Hartzman chalks it up to the usual big-picture differences that emerge in adulthood. In your early 20s, she says: “You’re just like: ‘Oh, I like this person, I’ll date them.’ But then, when you’re 28, you have to be like: ‘Does this person have the same intentions in life?’” Hartzman was interested in marriage and kids; Lenderman was not quite on the same page, she says. But, from the beginning, “I’ve known, even if we’re not romantic for ever, we’re creative collaborators for ever”. Lenderman will be on future records; while he won’t perform on their next tour, Hartzman insists it’s nothing personal; between Wednesday and his solo career, his touring schedule has been relentless and “he needs a break”.

The songs on Bleeds were written before the breakup, although some of them hint at the deteriorating relationship. The Way Love Goes started as an apology for not being fully present. “When I wrote it, I was like: ‘But I’m gonna fight for this,’” she says. “Of course, by the time we recorded it, that was not the situation.” Wasp, meanwhile, describes the bitter self-recrimination she felt towards the relationship’s end. “My body just kind of gave up on me,” she says. “I was really dissociated because I didn’t want to break up, but I was having to accept that we needed to”.

I am going to move to another interview with Karly Hartzman. PASTE published their interview last month. Ahead of the release of Bleeds, we got an insight into its creation and growth. It is an illuminating and amazing interview that gives more insight into one of the standouts of the year. If you have not heard Wednesday, then you really need to check them out:

“THE BLEEDS ALBUM CYCLE began in May with “Elderberry Wine,” a much quieter, more melodic choice compared to what kicked off the Rat Saw God momentum, “Bull Believer.” The decision got people talking online, some hoping the new record would still yield some heavy shit. “Elderberry Wine” (not an Elton John reference, sadly) was picked first because, aside from it being Hartzman’s parents’ favorite song on the album, it was a “slight” attempt to transition from Lenderman’s last solo release, the breakout indie hit Manning Fireworks. “People really resonated with [that record], and, strategically, we were trying to capitalize on that,” Hartzman says. “That’s not the most artistic answer but, realistically, with each new MJ or Wednesday album that comes out, we work in tandem and share an audience.” Haltingly, she reveals the obvious: “Plus, I wanted that song to be out for the majority of the summer, for people to bump.” Fans would get their wish eventually, as the stormy, overdriven “Wound Up Here (By Holdin’ On)” and the atonal, Dinosaur Jr.-craving “Pick Up That Knife” were released back-to-back.

“Pick Up That Knife,” like “Bitter Everyday,” “Phish Pepsi,” “Elderberry Wine,” and “Townies,” displays Bleeds’ not-so-secret-anymore weapon: Xandy fucking Chelmis. Some of his pedal steel phrases on this album are just unbelievable, and I tell Hartzman as much. “Bro,” she deadpans, “everything he does is fucking insane. Jake is irreplaceable as a guitarist, but, literally, if Xandy was not in this band, Wednesday is over.” She clarifies, “I would write other songs, but they would not be Wednesday songs, because so much of our identity is his playing and what he does with his instrument.” The blast of hissing, pissing, sludgy solos from Hartzman and Lenderman, the lead-footed percussion thwacks from Alan Miller, and Ethan Baechtold’s threaded bass notes in “Wound Up Here” were Chelmis’ idea. “He just threw that out casually,” Hartzman remembers.

“It’s infuriating. Like, how do you just know to go off like this? At first, you’re like, ‘This sounds fucking crazy, insane, stupid.’ And then he does it, and you’re like, ‘You motherfucker.’”

Chelmis doesn’t like “Bitter Everyday,” Hartzman reveals, because he doesn’t “feel like he got his part really right.” She listened to the song and, verbatim, told him, “You did the perfect thing, you little bitch.” Considering that Twin Plagues was Chelmis’ first honest pursuit of his instrument, the idioms he’s chasing on Bleeds are firmly at the mountaintop—lines that wince like the second-coming of Pete Drake, or something. “I think he’s going to be in high demand forever and ever, too, [for session work],” Hartzman gushes, before melting into a whisper. “But the thing is, people are going to know his playing and be like, ‘Is it a good song, or is Xandy just on it?’ Stylistically, his playing has so much personality. It’s so him. I think he’s going to be in history books for the tonal shit.”

But the genius of Wednesday is showcased best by its greatest contrasts, the two-minute ballad “The Way Love Goes” and the even shorter sheet-metal-blasted, hardcore blast of “Wasp.” Hartzman wrote the former while fighting for her deteriorating relationship with Lenderman. “By the time I recorded it, we were broken up,” she says. “And by the time we’re releasing it, my life will be completely different. I don’t really see Jake that often. I’m in a completely different place.” The song, which features an interpolation of a sorta-same-named Johnny Rodriguez tune, carries with it the best lyric on Bleeds, when Hartzman sings, “I’m scared to death there’s women less spoiled by your knowing.” I ask her about that line, to which she responds by saying, “As I’m getting older,” before chuckling and clarifying that she’s twenty-eight years old. “As a woman in an industry where you’re being seen as you age, your stock goes further and further down for a lot of people. I’m going to be starting to confront that a lot. But that’s crazy for me to say before I’m thirty. But it’s a reality! It’s always been therapeutic though. I’d be writing regardless of where my career was, whether it was sustaining me or not, just because of how much I need it”.

The final interview I am including is from Billboard. Published in August, Karly Hartzman spoke about how Wednesday nearly burned out. The fact that there was a relationship breakup and dislocation in the band before they hit the studio to record Bleeds. Wednesday were in trouble during the Rat Saw God period when they were touring. Things are looking more positive in their camp. Currently in tour, they are bringing these incredible tracks from Bleeds to fans cross North America:

“However, Bleeds is not a relationship tell-all: Hartzman wrote most of the record before Wednesday hit the studio — before she and Lenderman split — and in any event, many of its vignettes date back years. “Usually, there’s a story that I want to tell at some point in my career,” Hartzman says. “For example, maybe Xandy throwing up in the pit at the Death Grips show at Primavera in 2023. So I’ll try to organize in my mind anything that fits tonally with that story. … I’m just making sure the stuff I want to archive makes it in there, and then I build the rest of it out so it can actually be a song.” (Chelmis’ wayward Death Grips experience is documented on Bleeds single “Pick Up That Knife.”)

In the case of “Phish Pepsi,” a rerecorded version of a song Hartzman and Lenderman released on their collaborative 2021 EP, Guttering, she reached back even further to share a particularly harrowing experience. “My friend who was, like, my most chaotic friend in middle school sat me down as a seventh grader to watch back-to-back [the 2009 body horror film] Human Centipede and then a three-hour Phish concert in an air-conditioned room, super stoned,” she recounts. “I was just like, ‘Why is my friend torturing me?’ ” (Other than that day, “I’ve actually never sat down and listened to Phish,” she adds with a chuckle.)

Now, as the group prepares to hit the road, Hartzman says she and the band are in a better place than during the throes of the Rat Saw God period. She has had time to digest both her breakup and Wednesday’s rapid rise — “We didn’t have a second to process everything going on,” she says — and after a year off the road is “fresh as could be.” (As he focuses on his solo career, Lenderman won’t tour with the group going forward; Spyder Pugh is its new touring guitarist.) She has also instructed the band’s booking agent, Wasserman’s Andrew Morgan, to incorporate regular two-week breaks into its road calendar to mitigate exhaustion — which will prove important, considering the heavy touring the act has planned for Bleeds.

“We like to do not necessarily just ‘A’ and ‘B’ markets,” Hartzman says, citing her own experience living in Greensboro. “You can affect a lot of people when you play smaller markets — but that does result in a lot more touring than a normal band that’s maybe just playing New York or L.A.”

That means even more Wednesday fans will get to exorcise their demons alongside Hartzman and the group. “Anything I get to scream feels so good to me, and I’ve missed it so much,” she says. “I put screams in almost every song now, just because it is so therapeutic”.

I want to end by quoting a sizeable chunk of NPR’s review. Bleeds has received positive reviews across the board. I have started listening to Wednesday this year, so I have a lot of catching up to do. I think that Wednesday will continue to put out music for years to come. Such an exciting find:

“Bleeds starts with the most intimate encounter a Southern girl can have — pulling the ticks off someone's body — and follows up that image with the confounding but relatable line, "If you need me I'll call you." This rubber-band tension between a visceral and potentially embarrassing physical experience (in other songs it's a mosh pit or accidentally getting hit in the face with a baseball bat) and a distancing comment (something a mother might say at the end of an argument, or an ex trying to tamp a wound) defines the position Hartzman's made for herself within Wednesday's music. She feels everything hard, but she also stands apart, which is why she survives when those around her fall and can sort out their messes in these songs.

Tension accumulates musically throughout Bleeds as the band (all members are credited as writers on each track) leans all the way in one direction and then another, tangling up source material that includes hard honky-tonk, Southern boogie, Pacific Northwest grunge, cosmic country and outsider folk rock to create a sound that's very specific but never subordinate to its influences. The band's studio guitarist MJ Lenderman (who's no longer touring with the band since he and Hartzman disentangled themselves romantically as he began his own rise toward indie stardom after releasing 2024's critics' poll-topping Manning Fireworks) and slide guitarist/multi-instrumentalists Xandy Chelmis are crucial foils, intuiting when Hartzman's stories require a little sugar or a squall; the rhythm section of Ethan Baechtold and Alan Miller provide inexhaustible momentum while also knowing when to reduce the pull on the elastic so that, no matter what extreme the band's exploring, the songs' structures never break.

Wednesday wouldn't be itself without these dynamics, but it's Hartzman's singing that clinches the band's sound. Wednesday's outstanding 2022 covers album Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling 'em Up revealed much about how she developed her voice; she's taken lessons from forebears who went to extremes while hanging on to a fundamental beauty and control, from honky-tonker Gary Stewart to psychedelic romantic Chris Bell to confrontational troubadour Vic Chesnutt. On Bleeds she's both more rageful and more heartbroken than ever as she accounts for the destruction generated by drugs, neglect and the hopelessness that festers when people feel truly unseen. "Wasp" is a full-on screamo tirade, one minute and 26 seconds of emetically released frustration (and interestingly, a rare case of Hartzman turning her observational skills wholly inward, though its most haunting image, of herself as a spiderweb in a window, maintains her status as a barely-noticed presence in the pathway of others' doomed trajectories).

That song stands in contrast to the gently heartrending "Carolina Murder Suicide," inspired by a podcast but made as tangible as driveway dirt by Hartzman's careful writing. It's a ballad that echoes college rock classics like R.E.M.'s "South Central Rain (I'm Sorry)," songs that work against pop sentimentality by using pretty music to confront something horrific. Hartzman goes farther than most songwriters would by crafting a child narrator straight out of a Carson McCullers story, her innocence damaged by the carnage next door. She's left contemplating the meaninglessness of lives forgotten even after such a spectacular end: The house collapsed / But the fire kept on burning at the scraps / and I wondered if grief could break you in half / when the gossip died / and the ruins rotted away in the rain / and the fruit flies went to sleep in the rain. Insects as the only ones left to testify.

Making prettiness gleam like a weapon is one trick Wednesday has perfected in service of Hartzman's determination to resist anything too maudlin or too sweet. In "Townies," one of the most directly told stories on Bleeds, she recalls the lost companions of her juvenile delinquency; fragmented recollections of sexual assault and a frenemy's early death are thrown off-kilter by the power-pop sunniness of the chorus. Humor is another key tool for Hartzman. Writing the way normal people talk or think instead of like a lyricist, she cultivates the laughs that make pain bearable — that candy bar break at one funeral, the distortion of a livestreamed image at another. The absurdity of life on the margins reaches an apogée on the album's final track, "Gary's II," which re-introduces listeners to Hartzman's longtime landlord, a decrepit youngish guy whose dentures are finally explained as a casualty of a truly random bar fight. Heartbreak, Hartzman's stories make clear, may not exactly be accidental — the choices people make, mixed up with circumstances they don't create themselves, add up to the moment where the Louisville Slugger hits the lip.

It's a sign of Hartzman's maturity as a writer (and, dare I say, a person) that she applies this same compassion to her own misfortune. Followers of Wednesday will likely search for clues about that breakup with Lenderman, and though this album was made during that unraveling, they do appear, wrapped in affecting melancholy. "Elderberry Wine," the countrified weeper that's become Wednesday's biggest hit so far, juxtaposes snapshots of their relationship's fadeout with notes on the weirdness of fame. "The champagne tastes like elderberry wine" sounds like a homey reference to a homespun libation, a way of staying grounded in the face of growing fame, but it has a darky humorous punchline — elderberry, as Hartzman told podcaster Dylan Tupper Rupert on her show Music Person, is poisonous in large amounts.

Addressing the situation directly and briefly in the Lefty Frizzell rewrite "The Way Love Goes," she maintains her wit and her equilibrium. Her introversion broke up the couple, Hartzman told Rupert; kind to a fault, she said that Lenderman deserves a partner who enjoys the perks of the renown his own breakthrough brought, instead of one who retreats to the bedroom with a migraine. She says as much in this song — but with an edge: "There's women less spoiled by your knowing," she croons, pulling on the word "less" like taffy just to torture him before delivering that ambiguous predicate. Does "spoiled" mean "treated especially well"? Or "ruined"? That's between them, she offers, eyebrow arched.

Maybe Hartzman will get around to her version of Joni Mitchell's Blue at a later date. For now, she's focused on the reality that one person's pain always resonates within a much larger world of sorrow, and that wider view is what makes Bleeds so essential right now. Plenty of bad stuff is happening in 2025, that, to many, feels unprecedented. It's important, however, to always remember that for many people — for those edge walkers who have been cast out of society's embrace for reasons that are often beyond their control — disaster is a daily possibility. That lived reality is one thing that's brought us all into such a perilous position. All Karly Hartzman wants, she makes clear on Bleeds, is for people to remember that. To really feel it. Because the edge is never really that far away”.

Go and follow the brilliant Wednesday. Although not a new band, I think a lot of people in the U.K. especially are unaware of their music. I hope they get to spend some time in this country soon. Bleeds is one of the standout albums of the year. This is a band that…