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. From: https://www.npr.org/2025/09/22/nx-s1-5550130/wednesday-bleeds-album-review
