Wednesday, Hotline TNT and Lowertown at Brooklyn Steel 2024

In January, Brooklyn Steel hosted one of the best show lineups possible—as Wednesday, Hotline TNT and Lowertown shared a bill together at the NYC venue. All three acts had vibrant 2023s, with Hotline TNT signing to Third Man Records and releasing the critically beloved album Cartwheel—which landed on our Best Albums of 2023 list—while Lowertown put out their EP Skin of My Teeth—which made the top 10 of our Best EPs of 2023 list.

But, if you’ve been keeping up with Paste over the last year, you already know how Wednesday has fared with our music team. In April 2023, the Asheville band graced our digital cover story for the month and, in December, we named Rat Saw God the #1 album of the year (and “Chosen to Deserve” cracked the top 10 on on our Songs of the Year list).

“I listen to Rat Saw God and the bees in my stomach have come alive once more, just as they have in the molecules of Wednesday’s sound,” music editor Matt Mitchell wrote. “I now care about what the news anchor in the gas pump wants to tell me. There are teens doing whippets in the alleyway behind the local pharmacy; guns and cocaine are hidden in drywall. There is a parade everywhere, bounties of gargoyles, neon signs half alive and heads full of lice. When the eye of the storm calms down, there are five people. Five Tar Heel punks. Five rats. All of them, they’re more in love with each other and more in love with music than ever before. And what do rats do? They scavenge. They make use of what others throw away. On Rat Saw God, Wednesday have taken the ugly bits of their pasts—what everyone else has forgotten about—and reworked them into funny, imperfect and beautiful mementos of chaos and growth.

You can see pictures from Wednesday, Hotline TNT and Lowertown’s sets at Brooklyn Steel on January 25th, taken by Emilio Herce, below.