Bleeds by Wednesday

Everyone’s divorced!

It’s safe to assume Karly Hartzman bleeds like the rest of us: Not through a gushing wound, but in an annoying and haunting routine. It seeps through the walls like the dull voices on your neighbor’s shitty television program or the scuffle of your roommate dragging their feet late at night. It’s casual, nonchalant and entirely out of your control—unless you pack up and move out entirely. Until then, the stale air of home holds your grief and unknowingly taunts you.

Despite the name, Bleeds isn’t an inherently sad or hopeless album. It’s more so a tightrope walk between surviving and falling off into the abyss. It’s a pure and even spread of Wednesday’s discography. Some tracks—“Elderberry Wine” and “Phish Pepsi”—almost ditch the gaze-y factor entirely in favor of strummy crooner-type ballads that could appeal to the Nashville crowd*, while “Wasp” jumps straight into the scratchy screams of riot girl (Hartzman’s shrieking is notably influenced by Gouge Away) touting a single pitch, a quick turnaround and pent-up resentment.

Although Hartzman’s lyrics tend to detail very intimate experiences in unconventional places, her words are able to cling to everyone’s memories. “I’ve never had a unique experience” so goes the New Age adage, and the sweet song of weeds growing through trampoline springs and cold spots in the lake pin it to be true. Wednesday has always had a knack for spotlighting, romanticizing and staining the mundane, and Hartzman, though always just a witness, is an empathic narrator.

“Elderberry Wine” and “Bitter Everyday” recite a parallel lesson: The sweetest things in life have the potential to turn poisonous if not prepared with care and looked after. “Elderberry Wine” leans on the sweeter side of the notion, romanticizing how dizzying and unstable inconveniences can pull friends and lovers in closer (“At an unbolted leg scraping against the ground; as the tilt-a-whirl goes around”), with complete faith that opposing qualities just means more qualities and broadens horizons (“I wanna have your baby, cause you freckle and I tan”).

The track—which is somewhat ironically now Wednesday’s biggest hit—has a tinge of regret, not just for love, but for fame. Bubbles will always taste like Appalachia running down their throats, no matter the length or breadth of the group’s success. Everything they’ve released reeks of a Carolina upbringing, as both a punchline and a rhapsody.

“Bitter Everyday” also stakes the claim that a “sweet song is a long con,” but trailing a few tracks behind “Elderberry Wine,” the sweet facade has long soured. Hartzman bluntly croons, “You just keep on swimming through until you get past the cold spot in the lake,” seemingly trying to coax herself into believing the only way out is through. The first cold spot in the lake is always a laughable and welcome reprieve. But the whimsical grows jaded, and what you once greeted as a shock of excited shivers is soon a paralyzing chore to overcome.

While it doesn’t take much analysis to find signs of romance (or what used to be) littered across the record, the only track worth the break-up lens is the Merle Haggard-inspired “The Way Love Goes.” Hartzman spoke* of how difficult the slowest song on the record was to record, because it was initially written as a love song—and somewhat of an apology. The track finally saw daylight just after giving up on a compromise and the relationship entirely.

On the bright side, Haggard had five wives—using his passionate lyrics in what ended up being a breakup ballad won’t make him roll in his grave. On the downside, it’s apparent in Hartzman’s sloven voice the track was always destined to be a goodbye.

It’s a plainspoken reflection of the glacial shift complete intimacy accompanies: how liberating it is to have someone want to see all of you and how damning is eternal transparency. As Hartzman picks herself apart, she notes the same revelations you have about yourself in adolescence look even worse crossing the face of someone you love years later. Over a solemn guitar strum, Hartzman gut-wrenchingly reviews and relives her faults, closing with a once-sincere and now apathetic “that’s the way love goes.”

Vulgar metaphors and visceral experiences grace Bleeds in full, and they make clear bleeding isn’t always the result of misfortune—sometimes our own choices meet the correct circumstances to beat down a sparkling path for our doomed trajectory.

Hartzman bleeds like the rest of us, but unlike most of us, she seems to know that what feels like unparalleled pain is actually applicable to a vast wasteland of sadness, one where most of us could find a place to sit. Despite their songs revolving around niche juvenile delinquency and staunchly Appalachian laments, Wednesday never quite turns their observations entirely inward. Anyone can find somewhere within the lyrics to dip their feet in and watch their past friends and lovers wade through.

*Non-derogatory

**Hartzman hashed out the details in a first-person piece for Vulture.