The North Carolina band’s album was recorded a month after two of its members broke up, coloring the record with heartbreak.
The North Carolina band’s album was recorded a month after two of its members broke up, coloring the record with heartbreak.
One month before recording their album, “Bleeds,” Wednesday bandmates Karly Hartman and MJ Lenderman broke off their romantic relationship, leading to excruciatingly vivid lyricism filled with anguish in their Sept. 19 album release.
“We watched a Phish concert and Human Centipede / Two things I now wish I had never seen,” sings founder, frontwoman and primary lyricist of Wednesday Hartzman.
The lucid moment on the rising indie alt-rock group’s new track, “Wound Up Here (By Holdin’ On)” is just one of many on “Bleeds,” which blurs the line between lived experience, drawing from true crime podcasts, poetry books and Hartzman’s own experiences in North Carolina.
The album opens with “Reality TV Argument Bleeds,” centering around Hartzman’s writing ethos, unending inspiration from every corner of life.
This ethos continues into “Townies” and “Wound Up Here (By Holdin’ On),” which both reference Hartzman’s life in North Carolina and contain heavy themes of substance abuse, nostalgia and death.
“Met you in the neighborhood you had / Connects to get us high and then / You sent my nudes around / I never yelled at you about it / ‘Cause you / Died,” Hartzman sings on “Townies.”
The following track, “Elderberry Wine,” shifts the tone of the album as Hartzman’s voice becomes gentle. The first single released in the leadup to the album, the song quickly became Wednesday’s most successful track ever based on total Spotify streams.
In the context of the breakup between Hartzman and Lenderman, lines such as “Your eyes are the green of tornado sky” and “Say I wanna have your baby / ‘Cause I freckle and you tan” stick out as painful reminders of their six-year relationship.
Hartzman reflects on their relationship further in the mournful track “The Way Love Goes.”
“Feel like I’m almost good enough / To know you / I oversold myself /On the night we met” sings Hartzman.
Over the course of “Pick Up That Knife,” the album’s tone shifts again, from contemplative to hopeless and self-loathing with screaming lyrics like “One day, I’ll kill the bitch inside my brain.”
This self-contempt culminates in the loudest, angriest song, “Wasp,” where Hartzman uses vivid metaphors
“Canary shrieks and screams and spits / I’m stuck down here inside the lift,” Hartzman sings.
The track uses heavy distortion and raw energy, standing out as the most hardcore song on the album. For all of just under 90 seconds, Hartzman delivers every lyric in a throat-shredding scream.
The album closes with the melancholic and folksy “Gary’s II,” which chronicles the night of a man named Gary as he gets in a bar fight and loses his teeth — a callback to the band’s 2021 album “Twin Plagues,” which features a song titled “Gary’s.”
“Bleeds” is a raw, unapologetic indie alt-rock album highlighting Hartzman’s vivid storytelling, emotional vulnerability and poetic chaos. With sludgy guitars and gritty lyrics, the album has everything — heartbreak, nostalgia and “Human Centipede.”
“Bleeds” is available on all major streaming platforms.
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