Bleeds Cements Wednesday As Masters of the Short Story
On the indie rock outfit’s fourth album, darkness and humor uplift each other with jocose morbidity as Karly Hartzman’s pen amplifies them both.
In Raymond Carver’s 1983 short story “A Small, Good Thing,” a boy gets hit by a car on his birthday while eating potato chips with his friend. “He fell on his side with his head in the gutter and his legs out in the road,” Carver writes. “His eyes were closed, but his legs moved back and forth as if he were trying to climb over something.” The boy’s mother cancels the birthday party she’d scheduled for later that day, and the boy is soon hospitalized with a mild concussion. Despite what the doctor deems a one-in-a-million circumstance, the boy dies from a hidden occlusion. After receiving the news and heading home in complete dejection, the boy’s parents get a call from a baker, who says that the birthday cake they ordered last week and forgot to cancel is ready for pick-up. Looking for somewhere to divert their anger, the parents get in the car with the intention of killing the baker.
Karly Hartzman’s lyricism evokes similar feelings of absurd despair, often grounded in banal incidents yet told with florid, intricate detail. The Wednesday frontwoman is a maven of the mise en scene. Her penchant for crafting highly specific scenery could induct her into the pantheon of great American short story authors. It’s a throughline connecting the group’s early work to their modern day: the titular burned-down Dairy Queen on 2021’s Twin Plagues, the friend who needs to get his stomach pumped after an accidental Benadryl overdose on 2023’s “Chosen to Deserve,” the narrator who falls for someone at the Texaco pump on 2020’s “Coyote.”
On Bleeds, the indie rock outfit’s latest album, darkness and humor uplift each other, with Hartzman’s pen amplifying them both. There’s the narrator on “Townies” whose nudes get shared without her consent by a now-dead high school ex; the pitbull puppy “pissin’ off a balcony” in “Wound Up Here (by Holdin On);” the band’s multi-instrumentalist Xandy Chelmis vomiting in a Death Grips pit on “Pick Up That Knife.” The tragicomic takes a leading role on the band’s sixth album, which showcases its core songwriter sharpening her keen sensibilities as a preternaturally gifted raconteur. With more eyes and ears on Wednesday than ever, they don’t reinvent themselves for further mass appeal. Instead, Bleeds sees them truck ahead to refine their proven prowess.
When Wednesday captured the world’s attention with 2023’s Rat Saw God, it marked the kind of breakthrough that turned them from an underground staple into indie rock luminaries. Suddenly, Hartzman became the voice of a generation, not long before the band’s lead guitarist (and Hartzman’s ex-partner) Jake “MJ” Lenderman achieved a similar feat with last year’s Manning Fireworks. But whereas Lenderman almost exclusively leaned into Wednesday’s twangier stylings, Hartzman has doubled down on Sonic Youthian squalor while still injecting her fair share of country-fried zest.
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