‘Bleeds’ Confirms Wednesday As A Defining 2020s Indie Band

Lis Sinatra
image

We are 25 percent deep into the 21st century, and it’s really starting to feel like it. Back when we were only 23 or even 24 percent deep, it still seemed like we were living in the shadow of previous eras — the 2010s, the aughts, the 20th century, and so on. But in 2025, the future finally has landed, and it has landed hard. AI, ICE, NVIDIA, the IDEF — the world now is made up of foreboding dominant consonants and creepy occasional vowels, much like “dystopia” itself.

But let’s set that aside for now. Let’s instead talk about something fun, like indie rock. In this clarifying moment, what can we proclaim about this semi-popular music genre?

Wednesday is a defining band of 2020s indie.

I can support this claim by arguing that Wednesday is a figurehead for a significant indie-rock subgenre. But I can prove it by pointing out that Wednesday is also foundational for an additional indie subgenre. And then I can end the conversation by stressing how Wednesday bridges their seemingly incompatible worlds in novel and influential ways. Here goes: Wednesday’s 2021 breakthrough, their third record Twin Plagues, established them as leading proponents of the current wave of shoegaze bands. But it also put them in the vanguard of rising indie country-rock acts. The former happened mostly because of the music, which was loud and blown-out and confrontational and scream-y; the latter stemmed from singer-songwriter Karly Hartzman’s funny-macabre lyrical dispatches from what I call “the Gummo South,” which in concert with the ravaged music conveyed the country’s crumbling underbelly via a series of half-remembered amoral anecdotes with ambiguous meanings and elliptical punchlines.

The fifth Wednesday record, 2023’s Rat Saw God, subsequently confirmed two things: 1) Their melding of shoegaze’s sonics and country storytelling was now a genre onto itself; 2) It was now considered by critics and a growing audience of indie fans to be very important. But then something fascinating occurred. The following year, Wednesday’s guitarist MJ Lenderman put out his fourth record, Manning Fireworks. On his own, Lenderman’s downplayed the fuzz-rock Siamese Dream aspects of Wednesday and played up the alt-country twang, while also offering up more streamlined and accessible versions of Hartzman’s self-styled southern-gothic yarns. This was typified by the first singles from their respective albums: Rat Saw God was introduced with “Bull Believer,” an eight-minute noise-rock dirge that devolves into screaming for half the run time; Lenderman meanwhile ushered Manning Fireworks into the world with “She’s Leaving You,” a sly rocker about a philandering middle-aged man that immediately sounded as impervious to relisten fatigue as Full Moon Fever. Ultimately, Lenderman scored an even bigger critical and commercial hit.

All this leads to Bleeds, the new Wednesday album out this week. If you’ve read about Bleeds, you’re aware that the end of Hartzman and Lenderman’s romantic relationship informs some of the songs (most obviously the brief but poignant “The Way Love Goes”). And you’ve also surely been informed that Lenderman played on the record but will not perform on the support tour, given his own marathon road schedule in the wake of Manning Fireworks. But what hasn’t been discussed is the subtextual drive of Bleeds, which (to my ears) is a pronounced push to make Wednesday as approachable as Lenderman’s music. While their more abrasive aspects haven’t been completely excised, they do feel tamped down a bit. (The screamiest song, “Wasp,” is the shortest one on the record, working out its angst in just 87 seconds, a fraction of the bile dumped by “Bull Believer.”)

Elsewhere, Bleeds boasts some of the catchiest pop tunes of Hartzman’s career, particularly “Candy Breath,” a shining slab of bubble-grunge reminiscent of Hole’s turn toward proud plasticity on Celebrity Skin. Even better is “Townies,” a deceptively amiable jangler about a woman reliving the sexual humiliations of her youth that bifurcates country breeziness on the verses and rock sludge on the cathartic chorus.

And then there’s “Elderberry Wine,” Bleeds‘ first single and one of Hartzman’s finest songs. When it first dropped in May, it immediately seemed to me like an answer record (deliberate or not) to “Right Back To It,” the breakout from Waxahatchee’s 2024 LP Tigers Blood. Both are “traditional” sounding love songs that aspire to (and I think achieve) a certain timelessness. They also both feature backing vocals from Lenderman. (Though, tellingly, he’s buried deeper in the mix on the Wednesday track.) But despite their similarities, they end up at different destinations. In “Right Back To It,” Katie Crutchfield sings about the grace of finding a person who is willing to put up with all your worst traits. But in “Elderberry Wine,” Hartzman suggests that this might not be enough, given the human impulse to constantly devalue that which is most precious. Your worst traits might, in fact, make love impossible. Or, as she puts it, “even the best champagne tastes like elderberry wine.”

It’s a wryly acidic observation that fits with the perverse humanism of Hartzman’s overall worldview. In her songs, she’s constantly drawn to exceptionally grotesque needles placed amid the banal haystacks of everyday existence. In the bombastic alt-rock number “Wound Up Here (By Holdin’ On),” she notices the “dirty jersey up in a trophy case” during a vigil for a drowned high school student. During the frisky psychedelic honky-tonk of “Phish Pepsi,” she observes a middle-school party where drunk and stoned teens are traumatized by binging on Human Centipede and a three-hour jam-band bootleg. For “Bitter Everyday,” she mixes power chords with weird scenes from inside the gold mine, my favorite being the one about a “street Juggalo” who sings “a sweet song on the porch.”

From a lyrical perspective, Bleeds is as chaotic as the music is (relatively) orderly. Whereas the narratives on Rat Saw Good often seemed linear and coherent, nearly every lyric on Bleeds feels like a story onto itself. And Hartzman stacks them together like she’s emptying several notebooks filled with observations from life on the road as well as the North Carolina countryside. Sometimes, this approach risks lapsing into unwitting self-parody. (The line from “Pick Up That Knife” about throwing up in the pit at a Death Grips show could have come from a Wednesday lyric generator.)

As for her delivery, Hartzman’s voice remains Wednesday’s most “love it or hate it” element. Detractors will surely listen to the droning mini-epic “Carolina Murder Suicide” and blanch at her unsteady pitch and idiosyncratic phrasing. But for those of us who are fans, that voice remains a singular insurance policy against Wednesday ever becoming too poppy or mainstream. Even at its most palatable, Bleeds remains a defiant statement of artistic and regional specificity that could not come from any other band. And what a band, truly, Wednesday has become.

Bleeds is out 9/19 via Dead Oceans. Find more information here.