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I wanna talk about the people who live on the edge. The edge of town, the edge of disaster, the edge of most people's awareness. I'm not talking about some glamorous vampire in a Hollywood art movie. I'm talking about the messed-up homies and the freaks. The football champion who started drinking at the bars that don't card at 16 and didn't make it to 21. The punk pal who always goes too hard in the pit and makes it dangerous. That girl in high school who always went for the really risky losers. The local character who always just seemed kind of wacky until she ended up on a poster stapled to a telephone pole. Your coolest cousin, always there with the hookup, who somehow ended up dealing ketamine out of a motel room at 35.
These aren't super good people; they're not that bad, either. They just went their own slightly twisted way when society told them to straighten up, and then maybe found they couldn't get back to that point where a normal life launches. Or you know what? They don't give a damn. Something might have struck them down at some point, maybe even the hand of a loved one. People probably look right through them now. But see, they have this terrible knowledge that every turn in life carries the seed of something terrible, knotted up with the fun and with the sweetness. It's shut them out of the normie dreams upholding the American grind.
If you ever had a crazy phase or deal with a complicated extended family, you've known people like the ones I've just described. The underdogs I've mentioned are specific, though. They came alive in the mind of Karly Hartzman, the singer and lyricist for the North Carolina band Wednesday, whose sixth album Bleeds — their best yet and a contender for finest rock album of the year — intervenes in the current toxic public conversation by demanding acknowledgment that, for many Americans the line between survival and pratfalling into the abyss has always been vanishingly thin. "I wound up here by holdin' on," Hartzman wails in the feedback-fueled pile-up of a song with that title, set at the funeral of a former high school hero who drowned in a creek, where mourners buy snacks from a vending machine.
That chorus, which cops a line from one of the poet Evan Gray's wryly dark Appalachian laments, locates Hartzman herself within the fatally funny stories of Bleeds. Famously loyal to her home state (she now lives within walking distance of the high school she attended in Greensboro) and the ragtag crew of best friends and neighborhood regulars who populate her narratives, Hartzman is often described as a regional artist; if that designation reduces her in anybody's eyes, Bleeds blasts away any fences around her talent. She's a Southern rocker in the manner of the Drive-By Truckers or the Allman Brothers and a Southern writer evoking Dorothy Allison and Barbara Kingsolver — swamp and holler to the core, but much more than that, and never only that. Local sheds light on the whole damn world. Grounded as a copper wire, Hartzman writes some of the most richly detailed lyrics going these days — you can see the road she biked home on in middle school, drunk on a Four Loko, remembered here in "Phish Pepsi." As she assembles her observations and memories, Hartzman finds ways that her specifics zing outward in myriad directions. Her insights and observations have parallels in every overlooked spot where people stick together throughout their makeshift lives.
This happens in Wednesday's music as well as in Hartzman's lyrics — the sound of Wednesday after five years of hard-earned breakthroughs reflects that electric groundedness, the power to keep expanding from within a solid framework. Punk's noise and country music's tear-stained sweetness blend together to represent the ups and downs of the everyday on Bleeds, but nobody in Wednesday is cosplaying in a cowboy hat. No, this is all Hanes t-shirts and tattoos, bikini tops for when the party moves into the backyard stock tank pool. Get the particulars right, and your stories will land with the heshers in Tacoma and the skaters in Arizona just like they do with your own crew. Hartzman and her band are nailing every one.
Over the course of Wednesday's six albums, Hartzman has cultivated her role as an empathetic witness, never standing above the helter-skelter scenes, but able to preserve enough composure and clarity to track what happened before, during and after everything went to hell. That doesn't mean Hartzman avoids catharsis — throughout Bleeds, which fully secures Wednesday's place next to Creedence, Big Star, The Replacements and the Drive-By Truckers in the pantheon of stereotype-smashing regional rock, she yowls and hiccups and moans with such controlled force that a listener can virtually taste the sweat on her upper lip. But she always remains grounded in her mission: to tell the true story of these fools, who drive her crazy, whom she loves. Her determination is palpable. She held on and wound up here, with them.
Bleeds starts with the most intimate encounter a Southern girl can have — pulling the ticks off someone's body — and follows up that image with the confounding but relatable line, "If you need me I'll call you." This rubber-band tension between a visceral and potentially embarrassing physical experience (in other songs it's a mosh pit or accidentally getting hit in the face with a baseball bat) and a distancing comment (something a mother might say at the end of an argument, or an ex trying to tamp a wound) defines the position Hartzman's made for herself within Wednesday's music. She feels everything hard, but she also stands apart, which is why she survives when those around her fall and can sort out their messes in these songs.
Tension accumulates musically throughout Bleeds as the band (all members are credited as writers on each track) leans all the way in one direction and then another, tangling up source material that includes hard honky-tonk, Southern boogie, Pacific Northwest grunge, cosmic country and outsider folk rock to create a sound that's very specific but never subordinate to its influences. The band's studio guitarist MJ Lenderman (who's no longer touring with the band since he and Hartzman disentangled themselves romantically as he began his own rise toward indie stardom after releasing 2024's critics' poll-topping Manning Fireworks) and slide guitarist/multi-instrumentalists Xandy Chelmis are crucial foils, intuiting when Hartzman's stories require a little sugar or a squall; the rhythm section of Ethan Baechtold and Alan Miller provide inexhaustible momentum while also knowing when to reduce the pull on the elastic so that, no matter what extreme the band's exploring, the songs' structures never break.
Wednesday wouldn't be itself without these dynamics, but it's Hartzman's singing that clinches the band's sound. Wednesday's outstanding 2022 covers album Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling 'em Up revealed much about how she developed her voice; she's taken lessons from forebears who went to extremes while hanging on to a fundamental beauty and control, from honky-tonker Gary Stewart to psychedelic romantic Chris Bell to confrontational troubadour Vic Chesnutt. On Bleeds she's both more rageful and more heartbroken than ever as she accounts for the destruction generated by drugs, neglect and the hopelessness that festers when people feel truly unseen. "Wasp" is a full-on screamo tirade, one minute and 26 seconds of emetically released frustration (and interestingly, a rare case of Hartzman turning her observational skills wholly inward, though its most haunting image, of herself as a spiderweb in a window, maintains her status as a barely-noticed presence in the pathway of others' doomed trajectories).
That song stands in contrast to the gently heartrending "Carolina Murder Suicide," inspired by a podcast but made as tangible as driveway dirt by Hartzman's careful writing. It's a ballad that echoes college rock classics like R.E.M.'s "South Central Rain (I'm Sorry)," songs that work against pop sentimentality by using pretty music to confront something horrific. Hartzman goes farther than most songwriters would by crafting a child narrator straight out of a Carson McCullers story, her innocence damaged by the carnage next door. She's left contemplating the meaninglessness of lives forgotten even after such a spectacular end: The house collapsed / But the fire kept on burning at the scraps / and I wondered if grief could break you in half / when the gossip died / and the ruins rotted away in the rain / and the fruit flies went to sleep in the rain. Insects as the only ones left to testify.
Making prettiness gleam like a weapon is one trick Wednesday has perfected in service of Hartzman's determination to resist anything too maudlin or too sweet. In "Townies," one of the most directly told stories on Bleeds, she recalls the lost companions of her juvenile delinquency; fragmented recollections of sexual assault and a frenemy's early death are thrown off-kilter by the power-pop sunniness of the chorus. Humor is another key tool for Hartzman. Writing the way normal people talk or think instead of like a lyricist, she cultivates the laughs that make pain bearable — that candy bar break at one funeral, the distortion of a livestreamed image at another. The absurdity of life on the margins reaches an apogée on the album's final track, "Gary's II," which re-introduces listeners to Hartzman's longtime landlord, a decrepit youngish guy whose dentures are finally explained as a casualty of a truly random bar fight. Heartbreak, Hartzman's stories make clear, may not exactly be accidental — the choices people make, mixed up with circumstances they don't create themselves, add up to the moment where the Louisville Slugger hits the lip.
It's a sign of Hartzman's maturity as a writer (and, dare I say, a person) that she applies this same compassion to her own misfortune. Followers of Wednesday will likely search for clues about that breakup with Lenderman, and though this album was made during that unraveling, they do appear, wrapped in affecting melancholy. "Elderberry Wine," the countrified weeper that's become Wednesday's biggest hit so far, juxtaposes snapshots of their relationship's fadeout with notes on the weirdness of fame. "The champagne tastes like elderberry wine" sounds like a homey reference to a homespun libation, a way of staying grounded in the face of growing fame, but it has a darky humorous punchline — elderberry, as Hartzman told podcaster Dylan Tupper Rupert on her show Music Person, is poisonous in large amounts.
Addressing the situation directly and briefly in the Lefty Frizzell rewrite "The Way Love Goes," she maintains her wit and her equilibrium. Her introversion broke up the couple, Hartzman told Rupert; kind to a fault, she said that Lenderman deserves a partner who enjoys the perks of the renown his own breakthrough brought, instead of one who retreats to the bedroom with a migraine. She says as much in this song — but with an edge: "There's women less spoiled by your knowing," she croons, pulling on the word "less" like taffy just to torture him before delivering that ambiguous predicate. Does "spoiled" mean "treated especially well"? Or "ruined"? That's between them, she offers, eyebrow arched.
Maybe Hartzman will get around to her version of Joni Mitchell's Blue at a later date. For now, she's focused on the reality that one person's pain always resonates within a much larger world of sorrow, and that wider view is what makes Bleeds so essential right now. Plenty of bad stuff is happening in 2025, that, to many, feels unprecedented. It's important, however, to always remember that for many people — for those edge walkers who have been cast out of society's embrace for reasons that are often beyond their control — disaster is a daily possibility. That lived reality is one thing that's brought us all into such a perilous position. All Karly Hartzman wants, she makes clear on Bleeds, is for people to remember that. To really feel it. Because the edge is never really that far away.
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