Art in this piece: Bleeds (Album) by Wednesday
Over the weekend, my partner and I were walking down the street to dinner. We passed an entirely excessive pickup truck and I flinched at a squirrel in a tree. Naturally, she thought this was odd. I explained to her that I’ve had bad experiences with squirrels in trees, something that changed the temperature from odd to ridiculous. To top it off, I then recounted a series of events so ridiculous that I couldn’t tell them with a straight face.
In another life, a depressed, 20something, cellphone hawker at Telus scoured the Toronto downtown core for Jamaican food. That hungry telecom worker, me, made an order at the 4th-rate Jamaican chain, Ritz Caribbean Food. There was desperation in my craving for jerk chicken (something to fix me perhaps). I pulled up to Ritz to get my mobile order with 50 minutes left in my lunch. Ritz was across the street from the Eaton Center, Toronto’s premier mall-shaped tourist trap where I worked. The woman at the cash register informed me that my order wasn't ready at this Ritz, but actually available at a location 15 minutes up the street (at this point, there was about 40 minutes left of my lunch). On a boiling summer day, I trekked up Yonge street in my sun-hungry, all black uniform and caught the eye of a green peace canvasser. There we were, just two black men fated to click up. “Hey brother–”, already and understandably code-switching, “you care about the environment?” Before I can answer, he launches into his spiel. A couple of minutes in, a dying squirrel lands on my head and then plops on the ground. The green peace soldier continues. A minute after that, a random child hugged my leg and mistook me for his dad. The soldier keeps going. There’s now a scene around a dying squirrel and a confused kid being pulled away by his mom, and yes, the canvasser attempted to get my payment info. I had eventually cut him off to point out the chaos surrounding us and my need to pick up my food (lunch break was over and I was late). I arrived sweaty and was rewarded with cold chicken, the last time I’d ever go to Ritz.
My partner just laughed at this freewheeling odyssey of absurdity. Truth is often stranger than fiction and some shit is just too dumb to be real. The imagination and perception of the storyteller warps the narrated experience. Sometimes people entirely fabricate pieces to accentuate the dimensions of a story, sometimes it’s all made up. But what happens when stories combine, melt and mutate? What happens when stories are bricolage’d from from ourselves, friends, family, news and fiction? Somewhere between the magnetic fields of Mitski and Drive-By Truckers lies the whimsical, dark, surreal mundanity of Karly Hartzman and her pen; and she’s conjuring these very mutations. Hartzman, the nucleus of Wednesday, has continued to weave reality and surreality for several years on different projects. On the band's new record Bleeds, Hartzman is unquestionably emerging as one of indie rock’s most intriguing songwriters and storytellers.
The songwriting of Wednesday paints dripping, melted collages of meaning, narratives and perspectives that are quite unlike anything else spinning. Bleeds itself contains multiple levels of narratives throughout its 40-minute run time, featuring songs that often contain multitudes in themselves. There’s the ever present psilocybin poetry of Wednesday at its strangest and most fragmented on “Reality TV Argument Bleeds”. Bleed’s introductory headrush of crunchy noise rock guitars is full of loopy, bizarre half-images; ticks, half-hearted companionship, The Ring, logging roads. Some of Wednesday's songs are indecipherable whole pictures that are better understood as stitched together, channel-flipping daydreams. The album’s intro is a strong execution of their trademark style, creek rock. That aforementioned style bounds Bleeds with stories exclusively about the American south, stories that reimagine a modern southern gothic.
Bleeds imagines a world of stoned, southern gothic where teenagers light fires with leaf blowers and get high on pepsi can bongs. It sees a realm of white trash equilibrium where young burnouts make memories alongside sweet-singing, murderous juggalos and serial killers taking finger nails as prizes. This is deeply detailed and deranged songwriting and I mean that with high praise. Rat Saw God was Wednesday’s break out as a band, but the expansion of their total range has Hartzman’s writing as the driving spear of change.
There’s a folk-hearted, slacker rock ode to southern townies on “Townies”, a song cut into vignettes. It’s a rogue’s gallery of dirtbags armed with a clever chorus melody played up to blunt Hartzman’s warbly, nasal delivery which makes 3 different single words sound like one. There’s a whole spectrum of ballads, both sweet and savory. The tender, Lucinda Williams-spirit of “The Way Love Goes” on one end and the soft darkness of “Carolina Murder Suicide” on the other. The latter is particularly new ground for Hartzman and the band. The crawling pace and minutiae of this tragedy feels so real. It’s fiction full of palpable sadness, grief and loss, a spectacular highlight in a war chest of gems.
Of course, this record works particularly well because of its lyrics cast against its soundscapes. Often, it’s a stomping mash of noisy shoegaze guitars and alt country steel guitars. There’s an inherent tension and intensity in the way this music sounds, and there’s Hartzman’s vocals sitting in the middle of it all; a disaffection to the chaos and the multitude of events happening in twisted or outright stupid tales. Bleeds, and by extension Wednesday, is southern rock smashed into pieces and reconstructed into something younger, newer but just as mythologically-obsessed.
Bleeds feels like one part diary, one part anthology. There are moments where the album feels particularly close to the heart and other times where its narratives are a cosmic vortex of sayings, half-thoughts and half-memories. A story or a narrative can be anything, even a thing that doesn’t make complete sense. Sometimes the voice creates magnetic tension in how it says things versus what it’s saying. As Hartzman and Wednesday evolve, it feels like they continue to figure this out in grander, more fully realized ways. They’re creating superimposed versions of the south, where a song about watching a Phish concert and Human Centipede feel entirely unique, and that might be one of the greatest musical feats of 2025.