Transcending the circumstances that could have torn it apart, the band approach their own form of perfection on sixth album 'Bleeds'.
Photo: Graham Tolbert | Words: Marty Hill
It would be so easy for 'Bleeds', the sixth studio album from North Carolina band Wednesday, to have fallen apart. It was written as lead singer Karly Hartzman and guitarist MJ Lenderman's relationship broke down, it's the first since 'Manning Fireworks' capitulated Lenderman's own star perhaps beyond that of the band, and it's just their second on Dead Oceans (Bright Eyes, Mitski, Phoebe Bridgers) — the band having put most of their records out through one-man operation Ordinal. Thankfully, a difficult set of circumstances has done little to deter Wednesday from solidifying their claim as one of the most interesting rock bands of their generation.
Fusing the clarity and simplicity of country songs with the noisier side of shoegaze has always been the stated focus of Hartzman and her band and it remains so here. Tales of livestreamed funerals, bodies being pulled out of lakes, Phish & Death Grips concerts, foul-mouthed landlords and falling out of love have been collected first and secondhand and told frankly against a wall of lap guitars and screeching feedback.
Throughout the record, the band toy with the tension of country storytelling and pummelling guitar noise as if to prove just how tight of a grip they have on them. The noisier stuff comes to the fore on the blistering 'Wasp' whilst 'The Way Love Goes' and 'Gary's II' are the gentlest tracks on the record; the former wouldn't be out of place on a solo country album. The real highlights, though, come when the band crashes the two distinctions into one another with little restraint, as they do on opener 'Reality TV Argument Bleeds' and on the four singles that preceded the album's release. In particular, the way Hartzman's snarled delivery of the line, "Sometimes it feels like it will never end" on 'Pick Up That Knife'' ushers in a squealing wall of distortion which fizzes and concedes to a saccharine melody feels the perfect distillation.
Hartzman has never and does not plan to ever live outside of North Carolina and you feel that throughout the record. It is almost uncomfortably intimate, every story is told in the first person and either belongs to Hartzman herself or is borrowed from a friend. That deliberate narrowing of the world in which Wednesday songs are written makes everything feel so much more intense. On 'Bitter Everyday', she tells the story of a homeless woman who joined a late-night drunken guitar jam and was later discovered to be wanted for murder. It is not weaved into metaphor or meaning. It is a strange thing that happened that she wanted to write a song about and so this is the song about it. It's another example of how expertly the record contrasts clarity and chaos.
A lot of the talk around this release will focus on the break-up of the band's two most well-known members but, honestly, it's pretty inconsequential in the context of the record. Sure, given the hyperspecific nature of the storytelling, there are a couple of uneasy moments. But the pair are on good terms and will continue to work on Wednesday records together for the foreseeable (although Lenderman is stepping away as a touring member due to his own schedule). The real story here is that Wednesday have managed to take a step forward from 2023's much loved 'Rat Saw God', which featured on almost every year-end list.
You get the impression that the band have little interest in trying to overextend themselves in terms of experimentation. The focus is never on trying to find out what a Wednesday song would sound like under some sort of entirely new influence. It is still, nearly a decade in, about trying to write the perfect Wednesday record. "This is what Wednesday songs are supposed to sound like," Hartzman said of 'Bleeds,' "I feel like we've devoted a lot of our lives to figuring this out and we did it." She has good reason to believe that this is as close to perfect as they have come.
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