Wednesday to Return With New Album Bleeds

Two years after the release of their last album, Rat Saw God (our #1 album of 2023), acclaimed Southern rock outfit Wednesday is back with a new album. The highly anticipated Bleeds is due out on September 19 via Dead Oceans, and the new work promises to host a collection of songs marked by Wednesday’s trademark bootgaze sound. Still, while past albums were rooted in discovery, the band says Bleeds is the one that matches the picture they’ve formed in their heads of themselves. “Bleeds is the spiritual successor to Rat Saw God, and I think the quintessential ‘Wednesday Creek Rock’ album,” frontwoman Karly Hartzman said in a press release. “This is what Wednesday songs are supposed to sound like. We’ve devoted a lot of our lives to figuring this out—and I feel like we did.”

Coinciding with the album announcement is the release of the new single “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On).” Following up last month’s release, the twangy “Elderberry Wine,” interlacing guitars frame visceral lyrics sharing snapshots of a life well-lived. It’s an ode to living despite the confusion and pains. “This song is inspired by a story my friend told me, from when he had to pull a body out of a creek in West Virginia. Someone had drowned but they took a few days to resurface because of the current,” Hartzman explained. “’I wound up here by holdin on’ is a line from my friend Evan Gray’s poetry book: Thickets Swamped in a Fence-Coated Briars. He gave me and Jake a copy of it to read on tour once and that line stuck out to me as pure genius so I stole it and wrote the rest of the song in my own words around it.”

Along with the song comes a music video directed by Joriel Cura. Check it and the artwork and tracklist for Bleeds out below.