Wednesday Rejoice In Their Sicko Acrobatics

The last time I saw Karly Hartzman, it was on the Ace of Cups stage in Columbus, Ohio two years ago. The summer had rotted through and a sellout crowd spilled into the college town rumbling outside. Wednesday were plum tired, bowled over and worn thin by a nearly-over tour in the afterglow of Rat Saw God’s critical acclaim. They told the audience as much, but Hartzman, on life-support yet chuffed by a pack of rowdy frat boys getting entangled in low-swinging string lights while attempting to crowdsurf, still toiled through a rendition of “Bull Believer” that kicked the thumbtacks out of the wall. The quintet soon returned to Asheville to play a hometown show at the Orange Peel, but afterwards, there was no comedown. Just more bookings. “There was always something happening next,” Hartzman recalls. “I would get home and just work and work and work.”

At home, she wrote music and kept up with her sewing projects. But rest was off the table. “I felt like I couldn’t. Finally, this year, I’ve had significant time off. I feel like a normal human being again, but it took a long time to recover from that album cycle.” In 2023, Wednesday played over one-hundred sets. They’ll never do that again, and they’ve set “new standards of how much time we spend [on the road] and how many shows we do in a row” to make sure of it. By the time the Rat Saw God hype—which got so big it allowed her and her bandmates to quit their food service and retail jobs—thinned out, Hartzman had the bulk of her band’s fourth LP, Bleeds, written. She never sits down and plots out a record, preferring the stasis of gigging and idea-dumping until she reaches a “bookend in my life, thematically or whatever.” “I just say, ‘Okay, that’s the album.’ And then we record. And then the next one.”

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Hartzman recently relocated to her hometown, Greensboro. In fact, most of Wednesday has left Asheville completely. The band’s old haunt, a multi-acre strip of land owned by the late Gary King called Haw Creek, is still greatly adrift, alive plainly in Colin Miller’s fabulously somber album Losin’ and, too, during the conclusive piece of Bleeds, the aptly-titled “Gary’s II,” a successor to the Twin Plagues closer, “Gary’s.” This time around, Hartzman sings about a bar fight and gestures toward Gary’s mountain mouth, hollering about “teeth [that] had leapt from you so you spit ‘em all out” and cheekily relishing the moment she found out he had false ones. I ask Hartzman what brought her back to Gary. “He had a million stories, and I just wanted an opportunity to tell another one,” she says. “Asheville is turning into such a different place, as places do, and a lot of people are retiring. There’s a lot of people with money. It’s a tourist town. But when Gary grew up there, it was a mountain town. I wanted to preserve one of those stories, if possible. That’s one of the things that would have been lost if it hadn’t been said about him. We were there to hear him, and I want to pass him on.”

She thinks about Haw Creek a lot, mourning the three-hundred-and-seventy-five dollars a month it cost her to live there, the quarter-mile walk to the mailbox, and the now-departed Gary. But she remembers the acre or two of grass that always sat before her home, and how Gary would let it grow up to three or four feet high so it could blow in the wind. Then, when it got too tall, he’d break out a “big, weed-whacker-type thing,” cut it all down, and roll the grass into bales of hay. “It was a good way to organize time, rather than thinking of time day by day,” Hartzman admits. “You’re just watching the grass grow and be cut. It feels like a more organic way to separate the parts of your life. I miss that.” She lived with her bandmate and then-partner, Jake “MJ” Lenderman, and her other bandmates were never too far away. It was encouraging, having creative people with common interests all living in one place together. In Greensboro, she lives alone and doesn’t hang out with too many musicians. “When you only hang out with musicians, you can fool yourself into thinking that’s the only type of person on the earth. And that’s actually not the best way to think, because there’s so much other stuff happening that is nice to be plugged into.” A cool thing about Hartzman’s new home? “I can go on a walk,” she says. “I couldn’t go on a walk in Asheville, because we lived on a mountain road where there were no sidewalks.”

Of course, she’s always going to write about the South, too, even if her bandmates goof on her for how obvious a choice that may be. “That’s what Wednesday is about. That’ll always be there, because that’s a deep part of me.” And, in an era where country music is as popular as it’s ever been, artists across the entire Western Hemisphere are borrowing from the South, incorporating the fashion and aesthetics of the region into their image. Hartzman feels neutral about it, as she’s witnessed the transformation firsthand while touring. “A bunch of people in Brooklyn are wearing camo and Carhartt,” she laughs, after checking to make sure I don’t live in New York City. “The first tour we did in 2018, we rolled up wearing all that stuff and we stuck out like a sore thumb. I remember being on the train with Jake in his trucker hat and Carhartt [jacket] and being like, ‘We do not look like we belong here at all,’ and I felt really uncomfortable.”

She recalls seeing a map of potential Iran retaliation sites in the United States online recently and wading through the public’s reactionary calls to “shift it to all of the Trump-voting red states.” “There’s that swath of people that still boil this area down to that,” she clarifies. “But I know a lot of queer and minority people that are from the South and feel really uncomfortable [in New York].” Recent albums, like Losin’, Fust’s Big Ugly, Jason Isbell’s Foxes in the Snow, and Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band’s New Threats From the Soul (if you consider Louisville to be in the South) are doing a good job extracting the stigma around the South without oversaturating the romantic currency of its geography. “There is so much to love,” Hartzman argues. “There’s a lot of layers, like an onion, to quote Shrek. One of my favorite compliments I could get from a person in that demographic is that the music reframes that feeling of complete shame about this area.”

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” 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.’”

But 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.”

I am mystified and grievous in the company of lines like “I’m not as entertaining as you might’ve thought I was then” and “you reappear before I noticed you were gone,” as Hartzman’s images of death and devotion metastasize into disaffection and disappointment. But as this recurrence of loss, illustrated in unorthodoxy, on Bleeds sits on my mind, resonance remains on Hartzman’s, and she believes that “The Way Love Goes” will reach a lot of people, women especially. “A lot of them experience this, where they have the energy in a relationship, at first, to be this person that isn’t fussy and can hold up all of these ideals and can be energetic and entertaining. Whatever that other person needs,” she reckons. “And, as the relationship goes on and you don’t have the energy to hide some of the negative aspects of yourself, or you’re feeling spent, it gets harder to put up that character. It’s a lot of work to be an ideal for someone, and then, eventually, it’s just you.”

Real creekgaze hoopers may recognize “Phish Pepsi” from Wednesday’s Guttering EP. Released before their big break, the song is a favorite of Hartzman’s but she doesn’t believe it “got its day in the sun.” So she snared it with newness, recalling the opening bassline in Dolly Parton’s “Gettin’ Happy” and the slow introduction of the band around it. She wanted to include trip-hoppy drum loops, but “the band hated that idea” just like they hated Bleeds’ original working title, Carolina Girl. “But then we tried it and they were like, ‘Okay, it worked.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, bitch, I told you,’” she elaborates. “That song shows that, if we’re following our tastes and being open-minded, it’ll create a good song.”

And Hartzman wants to set the record straight: She doesn’t know shit about the band Phish. Instead, the song is about two seventh graders huddled in a freezing, air-conditioned beach house bedroom watching a three-hour Phish concert and The Human Centipede back-to-back. It was Hartzman’s Kim Cattrall moment. “Whether I like the music or not, I wasn’t interested in sitting down in this room and watching it. I was like, ‘I can’t believe this is what I am doing tonight.” But what she does know shit about is attachment and consequences, and “Phish Pepsi” is a cautionary tale for anyone devoting themselves to charismatic, chaotic people. As “It looks like you’re holding up alright, but I know it’s sometimes hard to tell” becomes “I don’t sleep in that room anymore, when the cicadas sync up they breathe too hard,” Hartzman lets her story of getting fucked up on some Four Lokos and then riding a bike home pale into encountering a friend she had “an attached, life-or-death love that blurred friendship with” at a funeral livestream. “Everything else you could feel for a person,” she admits. “And that has reoccurred and broken my heart a lot of times in my life.”

Hartzman and Lenderman’s breakup was the subject of online discourse in 2024, as Lenderman was doing press for Manning Fireworks and his relationship status was subtly revealed in a Guardian profile and then at-length in GQ the following winter. So far, the end of the musicians’ romantic relationship has avoided history’s penchant for romanticizing traumatic, disintegrating things in the entertainment business. Though some, including myself, may have wondered if Bleeds would be Wednesday’s Rumours or Blood on the Tracks, I can assure you that it’s neither of those titles, but a secret, far less dramatic third option. Hartzman knew Lenderman’s music before she knew Lenderman himself, and their creative partnership has always been an anchor—as bandmates or otherwise. Coming off the busiest year of his life, Lenderman’s hiatus from the Wednesday’s tours is indefinite but not end-all. “Because we care about each other, it wasn’t difficult for me to accept that that’s what he needed. I know he needs that rest,” Hartzman says. “He was able to say, definitively, that he’s still going to be on these records and in the band creatively, because he’s a non-negotiable part of our identity. The confidence in knowing that we’ll continue to take care of each other and nourish the parts that aren’t killing us, it’s been really nice.”

TWO YEARS AGO, HARTZMAN TOLD ME that she enjoys writing something that’s purposefully out of her singing range, which is why “Bull Believer” exists. On Bleeds, her harmonics melt into a syrup on “Elderberry Wine” and “Townies,” as if she’s finally writing purposefully in her range. Yet the quieter, more conventional country notes submit their own challenges. “I find those songs a lot harder to sing,” Hartzman gestures, before admitting that she was scared to sing “Elderberry Wine” on Colbert. “There’s no performance aspect to hide behind. It’s very much, ‘How well can you sing this song you wrote?’ I’m not a trained singer. I’m not wearing a crazy outfit purposefully or distracting with dancing. If I don’t perform it well, and I’m not hiding behind any sort of scream, or anything that people can be like ‘Oh, shit, she’s going off, she’s performing the shit out of that’ about, I just have to sing this fucking song. It’s terrifying.”

Hartzman’s lyricism is ever-spectacular on Bleeds. Aside from hocking the “I wound up here by holdin’ on” line from one of Appalachia poet Evan Gray’s books, Thickets Swamped in a Fence-Coated Briars, her vocabulary is academic and anecdotal, autonomous, and accidental but never unreachable. “Expressing yourself the way you want to is the only way to write, at least for me, a good song,” she concedes. “But you don’t want it to be completely inaccessible to people. I don’t want you to need a college degree to connect with the music. Stuff that gets too abstract and dense is not as enjoyable to listen to.” We swap favorite lines, mine being “You opened up a portal into your sicko world” and hers being “Potpourri, dead smell of a stagnant creek,” which reminds her of her Nana’s house. “It’s an extinct object that I’m letting resurface. It feels archeological. There’s a creek I pass almost every day when I’m walking in my neighborhood that I hadn’t accessed when I wrote that song but that completely describes that space. To describe something I hadn’t encountered yet but that I knew existed just from living here was cool. Also using the word ‘potpourri’ in a song, I feel like, is an acrobatics in itself.”

Writing Bleeds allowed Hartzman to play the part of a listener, which she argues will “always be more interesting, because the stuff in my own head, I’m stuck with that all the time.” She’ll bring those voices out every once in a while, like on “The Way Love Goes” and “Wasp,” until she inevitably gets sick of them. “Making a whole album within your own mind and the stuff you’re dealing with, I don’t think it’s necessary for me. It’s not good for me. Being too inward doesn’t serve my music.” Accordingly, “Carolina Murder Suicide” was inspired by a true-crime podcast, “Gary’s II” passes a memory on like a folktale or an heirloom, and “You sent my nudes around, I never yelled at you about ‘cause you died” is a deliriously specific saga that’s happened everywhere and nowhere in particular. An Afrin addiction colliding with a Death Grips show mosh pit makes for a puke-y memento, a drowning victim’s jersey becomes a prize on display at his high school, and grocery store sushi, foreign coin machines, and fridge lights plug up the leaks of small living. Hartzman and her band are “rotting away in to-go containers”; in jittery, head-splitting passages of nosebleed rock, tick-picking serenades, and warm, mutated country sinews, Bleeds is a garden-variety of vibrance.

In June, Hartzman told AP that she “writ[es] the same songs over and over.” In that context, it’s hard to listen to “Bull Believer” and “Wasp” and not draw a line of continuity between the two. Obviously, both licks are hard as hell, but there’s a line in “Bull Believer” that goes, “God, make me good but not quite yet.” On “Wasp,” the detonation ends with “God’s plan unfolds so slow.” Religion appears now and again in Hartzman’s songs, often in frequencies of patience. But, growing up and even still, she didn’t “have the comfort that faith normally provides.” It plagues a lot of our generation, the lack of safety or community that may have once lied within a religious belief. “I think I’m trying to access parts of what that could provide through these songs because, yeah, there’s such a lack of it in reality. Everything is just chaos. But, if I could fool myself within the song into thinking that things happen for a reason, I’ll use that space to explore that idea,” says Hartzman.

She is a pack-rat and an upcycler in her art and at her home. Behind her during our conversation, tchotchkes are stacked and glued from floorboard to ceiling tile. She exits her Zoom box for a moment, returning with a framed photograph of her dad in hand. “It was taken because my parents had broken up,” she regales. “They had broken up, but my mom still had a key to his house and, months later, just let herself in and had written in lipstick all over his car. He walked in after work and she was like, ‘I regret everything. I miss you so much, I love you.’ And she took this photo that night, which is so psycho. You can tell he’s just like, ‘What the fuck?’ They ended up together and had me and my sister, so it’s sweet. But that story is just so insane that she did that. I see so much of myself in that, of the chaotic and intense way that my family loves.”

When Hartzman’s writing does veer into the personal, as it does on “Phish Pepsi,” “Chosen to Deserve,” and “Handsome Man,” it’s often in service to a part of her childhood that she can vividly remember—because she’s “starting at the beginning and slowly moving forward in a queue.” I ask her if adulthood has gotten as intensely vivid yet. “As it recedes, yeah,” she says, then acknowledging that her timeline is catching up and will meet her in the moment eventually. “Maybe I’ll be fifty and writing about when I’m twenty-eight. I’ll never be able to write everything via song, because it’s such a limited space and the output is so years in-between. I’ll never get to it. And that’s a good thing, because it means I’ll never run out of shit to write about.”

“Would you ever consider writing a book?” I ask.

“Mhm,” she replies, evasively nodding her head and grinning.

Hartzman considers Bleeds—a record that pummels, soothes, and unnerves its listeners with blood-curdling guitar labyrinths, strange and uncomplicated chestnuts, and gallant, gross-out wisps of a zoomer-gothic quietus—to be a wrap on the sound Wednesday has been refining since I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone. Still, the chemistry between the fivesome at this intermission is uncanny, on an album that is immediately fuller, freakier, and more dialed-in than the three that preceded it. “No one knows me better than them,” Hartzman says. “Being understood is really, really nice and rare. Like, truly understood.” So what’s next? “One of the ideas I have is doing a bunch of hardcore songs from the perspective of different horror movie protagonists. I’ve written a few songs like that.” I ask her if she’s reached Slumber Party Massacre II yet, where the killer’s infamous drill is actually a guitar. She applauds the franchise’s commitment to a dick euphemism. “The only way in my life I will have penis energy is with my guitar.”

Bleeds is out September 19 via Dead Oceans.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

COVER STORY | Wednesday Rejoice In Their Sicko Acrobatics

Karly Hartzman speaks with Paste about leaving Haw Creek, chasing the tones of Dolly Parton and Dinosaur Jr., songwriting as archeology, and her band’s brilliant new record, Bleeds.