“Say I wanna have your baby/‘Cause I freckle and you tan.” It’s a startlingly great couplet that’s been rattling inside our heads all summer, ever since Wednesday previewed their new album, Bleeds, with the single “Elderberry Wine” in May. Some might tell their partner, “I hope our kid gets your nose,” but Karly Hartzman takes it up a notch. Her lyrics are rooted in utter specificity and late-twenties realness, sounding tender and timeless across Xandy Chelmis’ lap steel. “I find comfort that angels don’t give a damn,” she sings.
If you think the honeyed ballad stands in stark contrast to the lead single on Wednesday’s previous album (the ferocious, eight-minute “Bull Believer,” from 2023’s Rat Saw God), that’s intentional. When Wednesday guitarist MJ Lenderman released the alt-country masterpiece Manning Fireworks last year — and as a result rose to the level of Music Your Dad Has Heard Of — the band decided to capitalize on it, hoping to attract a wider fanbase. It worked.
But Bleeds — Wednesday’s sixth album, made with their longtime producer, Alex Farrar — still contains the North Carolina band’s original elements of fuzzy, feral shoegaze, like “Wasp,” where Hartzman screams for a minute and 26 seconds. There’s also sublime creek-rock, like the beautiful banger “Wound Up Here (By Holding On),” which Hartzman described as one of her favorites she’s ever written (she screams on that, too). These shifting sonic landscapes, combined with Hartzman’s fearless, razor-sharp lyrics, make for a wild Southern gothic odyssey — one you’ll willingly take again and again, regardless of how dark it gets.
And Wednesday want it darker. Death is casual on Bleeds, as are ghosts. “You sent my nudes around/I never yelled at you about it cause you died,” Hartzman sings on the euphoric rocker “Townies” (that last word sounds more like dieeeee-hihiiiiii). Hartzman weaves a patchwork quilt of delicious dread — drowned football stars are found in shallow streams, bodies lay on the road, funerals are livestreamed, and some knife safety might be in order. There’s even a track titled “Carolina Murder Suicide,” about the Murdaugh trial. “Death is around at every point,” Hartzman said. “If you don’t acknowledge that, you’re lying.”
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Hartzman is at the peak of her songwriting on Bleeds, with instantly quotable lines both profound (“The easy things in life keep getting harder everyday”) and genuinely funny stoner escapades (“We watched a Phish concert and Human Centipede/Two things I now wish I had never seen”). Some lyrics, like on the Pavement-esque slacker-rock special “Pick Up That Knife,” seem tailor-made for TikTok: “Grocery store on Christmas/Parked too close to someone to get out.” And the gnawing centerpiece, “Candy Breath,” is the best song to mention refrigerator light since Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well.”
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Though it was revealed during the Manning Fireworks press cycle that Hartzman and Lenderman had ended their romantic relationship after six years, the material for Bleeds was written prior to their split. (Lenderman has confirmed that he’s still in the band, but will no longer tour with them). It’s not a breakup album, though “Elderberry Wine” and the ultra-delicate “The Way Love Goes” are about their strain. The latter positions Hartzman front and center, her vocals isolated with only a hint of guitar, as she delivers a gut-punch of emotion. “I’m scared to death/There’s women less/Spoiled by your knowing,” she sings. “Newer and much sweeter/Many much more patient/With much more than I can give.”
Hartzman’s bandmates — Lenderman, Chelmis, drummer Alan Miller, and bassist Ethan Baechtold — vetoed her original title for the album, Carolina Girl. It’s a bummer, because you can feel her home, her forever muse, across the entire record, from bonfires to drives down I-40. Bleeds concludes with the sprawling “Gary’s II,” a sequel to “Gary’s” on 2021’s Twin Plagues. It’s a folk stunner that details a brutal bar fight that Hartzman and Lenderman’s former landlord got into when he was 33 years old; dentures were needed. Though he died a few years ago, his anecdote is now sealed in Wednesday’s creek rock amber, waiting to be discovered. So crack open a beer. There’s more stories to come.
