Indie-Rockers Wednesday Nearly Burnt Out — This One Touring Rule Will Keep Them ‘Fresh As Can Be’

“You saw a pitbull puppy pissing off a balcony,” belts Wednesday vocalist-lyricist Karly Hartzman on the band’s new single, “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On).” It’s exactly the type of evocative, instantly memorable line that has helped to propel Wednesday to the forefront of the indie world — and Bleeds, the North Carolina group’s sixth album (due out Sept. 19), is chock-full of them.

Hartzman’s lyrics blur the line between memoir and fiction and come from any number of places: lived experience, local news, vivid passages in books — or, in the case of the pissing pitbull puppy, from a text from her mother. “She said, ‘This sounds like something you would write!’ ” Hartzman says, explaining that her mom works for a nonprofit that helps struggling mothers and saw the urinating canine when making a site visit. “I was like, ‘Mom! How did you know?!’ ”

In recent years, Wednesday has remade a specific corner of indie rock in its own image. Its 2021 breakthrough, Twin Plagues, earned the band a following with its heavy hybrid of shoegaze and country, and it further refined that sound on its acclaimed 2023 set, Rat Saw God, helping to precipitate a boom of so-called “alt-country” bands. Jake “MJ” Lenderman, one of 2024’s biggest new indie stars, plays in Wednesday, and producer Alex Farrar’s Drop of Sun Studios, where both Wednesday and Lenderman record, has become a destination for musicians seeking their same twangy spark.

“I love lifting up a whole community of people,” Hartzman says. “That’s been really cool to see.” (She calls Wednesday’s music “creek rock”: It describes the area in East Asheville, N.C., where she, Lenderman and some of their peers came up.)

Hartzman, 28, wrote and recorded Bleeds, Wednesday’s second album for eminent indie label Dead Oceans, at a pivotal time for both the band and herself. For Rat Saw God, Wednesday — which is rounded out by Lenderman (guitar/vocals), Xandy Chelmis (pedal steel/vocals), Ethan Baechtold (bass/piano) and Alan Miller (drums) — toured the world like never before, and as the itinerary pushed the band to its “absolute limit,” Hartzman became homesick. “It’s weird as f–k, singing these songs that are inspired by my home but never being home,” she says, as her orange cat Girl Girl patrols the room behind her in her Greensboro, N.C., home.

When Wednesday was touring Tokyo in March 2024, Hartzman and Lenderman ended their six-year romantic relationship; the following month, the band entered the studio to record Bleeds, and Hartzman and Lenderman hid the news from their bandmates. “I was desperate to capture everything we had built, from all the touring,” Hartzman says. “I was just kind of numbing it out and putting my head down.”

“It was a weird vibe,” says Chelmis, who also plays with Lenderman. “It was heavy and awkward, and the rest of the band, we were like, ‘What’s going on?’ But we were just like, ‘Time to make the songs.’ ”

However, Bleeds is not a relationship tell-all: Hartzman wrote most of the record before Wednesday hit the studio — before she and Lenderman split — and in any event, many of its vignettes date back years. “Usually, there’s a story that I want to tell at some point in my career,” Hartzman says. “For example, maybe Xandy throwing up in the pit at the Death Grips show at Primavera in 2023. So I’ll try to organize in my mind anything that fits tonally with that story. … I’m just making sure the stuff I want to archive makes it in there, and then I build the rest of it out so it can actually be a song.” (Chelmis’ wayward Death Grips experience is documented on Bleeds single “Pick Up That Knife.”)

In the case of “Phish Pepsi,” a rerecorded version of a song Hartzman and Lenderman released on their collaborative 2021 EP, Guttering, she reached back even further to share a particularly harrowing experience. “My friend who was, like, my most chaotic friend in middle school sat me down as a seventh grader to watch back-to-back [the 2009 body horror film] Human Centipede and then a three-hour Phish concert in an air-conditioned room, super stoned,” she recounts. “I was just like, ‘Why is my friend torturing me?’ ” (Other than that day, “I’ve actually never sat down and listened to Phish,” she adds with a chuckle.)

Now, as the group prepares to hit the road, Hartzman says she and the band are in a better place than during the throes of the Rat Saw God period. She has had time to digest both her breakup and Wednesday’s rapid rise — “We didn’t have a second to process everything going on,” she says — and after a year off the road is “fresh as could be.” (As he focuses on his solo career, Lenderman won’t tour with the group going forward; Spyder Pugh is its new touring guitarist.) She has also instructed the band’s booking agent, Wasserman’s Andrew Morgan, to incorporate regular two-week breaks into its road calendar to mitigate exhaustion — which will prove important, considering the heavy touring the act has planned for Bleeds.

“We like to do not necessarily just ‘A’ and ‘B’ markets,” Hartzman says, citing her own experience living in Greensboro. “You can affect a lot of people when you play smaller markets — but that does result in a lot more touring than a normal band that’s maybe just playing New York or L.A.”

That means even more Wednesday fans will get to exorcise their demons alongside Hartzman and the group. “Anything I get to scream feels so good to me, and I’ve missed it so much,” she says. “I put screams in almost every song now, just because it is so therapeutic.” 

This article originally appeared in the Aug. 16, 2025 issue of Billboard.