If you need to scream
From Fall '25: Wednesday's album Bleeds, thoughts thereon
Hello, little music-blog-reading people in my computer! It’s been a while. I’m trying to ease back into longform writing, and I figured one starting point would be to share this thing I wrote last fall about Bleeds, my (probably? maybe?) favorite album of 2025. This essay was written in September so please do not worry about me (unless you own a time machine, then definitely feel free to travel back to late summer 2025 and worry about me). Thanks in advance for reading!!!!
I’ve tried to get into Wednesday so many times since I saw them play at Mohawk on May 1, 2023. It was the last night I spent married—like, really married. I mean, I legally was for two years and 22 days afterward, but only legally. Time and memory get sloppy in the wake of grief, and although I wouldn’t find out the information that would blow apart my life until the following day (May 2, 2023), in my mind the Wednesday concert has always been streaked with that same sick feeling that bowled me over the following day. I mean, it’s not like we were having a great time at the concert, either—something was way off, and I could feel it. Wednesday’s chugging chords, frontwoman Karly Hartzman’s woozy vocals, the Lonestar moat I poured to keep the monsters at bay—the last two years, it’s all been tied up in Wednesday’s music for me. That is, until the other day at Austin’s Levitation Festival, when I saw Wednesday live again, and the curse was broken.
Well, I’m not sure it’s accurate to say a curse was broken, because nothing really…got better. It’s perhaps truer to say that some sordid prophecy, commensurate with the band’s dark motifs, was fulfilled: the music that had never made me feel anything but nausea before, all of a sudden flooded me with blood-hot sorrow.
“They’ll meet you outside, they’ll meet you outside, they’ll meet you outside, they’ll meet you outside,” howled Hartzman in the Palmer Events Center, at the top of her lungs. Tears streamed down my cheeks in the darkness of the crowd; I didn’t understand what the song was about, but her raw emotion felt like a stab to a scar. I’ve been trying my best to heal, to move on, to get over the one who broke my heart. I’m tired of trying to ascertain if it’s working, and some nights, all that’s left is the screaming void.
The way people talked about Rat Saw God, Wednesday’s acclaimed 2023 album, made me sick that year. It was impossible to describe then, and I didn’t make a big deal about it because I didn’t want to seem contrarian over something that could barely be characterized as a real opinion. People enjoyed its grit, it seemed, and while I sincerely liked the concept of grungy Southern goth rock, I couldn’t linger with the album long enough to glean anything other than Karly Hartzman saying Stuff That Sounded Edgy and Cool. For reasons I couldn’t articulate, it felt like a mockery of my personal pain. May 1st. May 2nd. The amount of times since that I’ve sat in my hot car and screamed and screamed and screamed.
The Levitation show last weekend wasn’t technically the first time I’ve given Wednesday a second chance. A couple months ago, I’d listened to the new album’s first single, “Elderberry Wine,” and cautiously enjoyed it. The gentle guitar strums and pedal steel won me over where the band’s prior discord hadn’t. But I was still highly skeptical that the new album, Bleeds, would be able to offer me anything Rat Saw God couldn’t.
I was wrong. Since Wednesday’s Levitation set the other day, I’ve been listening to Bleeds nearly nonstop. I can’t speak to the rest of the band’s catalog, but I feel like I finally understand Hartzman as a narrator now. Where I was expecting snark, I found tenderness. The point is not her grotesque, eloquent small-town vignettes—interesting as they are. It’s the humans inside them.
I like all the songs on Bleeds, but the six-song run from “Candy Breath” to “Carolina Murder Suicide” has particularly knocked me on my ass. Right in the middle of it sits “Pick Up That Knife,” the song that made me cry at Levitation. “When you pick up that knife you’re askin’ for a fight / mouthed off to those bikers at a vacant stop light,” Hartzman sings, setting the scene for the first round of “They’ll meet you outside”s. Death of a loved one is always just a knife slice away, on the other side of an uneasy night of drinking. She describes water that won’t go down the drain, winter that won’t give way to spring. At the end of the song, a treatise on loss:
Thought you’d get shipped home in a full-body cast
Never could get your head out of your ass
Baptized to freedom and born in bondage
Had to bury you deep to keep the dogs from diggingThey’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outsideThey’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outsideThey’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outside
Grief is gory. A corpse the dogs can sniff out. “I freckle and you tan / I find comfort knowing angels don’t give a damn,” sings Hartzman on “Elderberry Wine,” sneaking a gut punch into a song that’s seemingly easygoing. I freckle, and he tans, and now we’ll never know what could’ve been.
I cried again when I first listened to Bleeds’ penultimate song, “Carolina Murder Suicide.” How could you not? “The house collapsed, but the fire kept on burning at the scraps / and I wondered if grief could break you in half.” I don’t know if it’s a real story Hartzman tells in the song, but it’s a true one. Not just about what happened to me, or to her neighbors, or to any one of us specifically. But about the wound that burns at the middle of everything, that bleeds in all of us. The flood that tore the band’s hometown of Asheville apart this time last year. The Texas flood that killed my grandparents’ friends in June. The horror of a world that gets sicker every day. Looking it all in the eye isn’t a mockery; it’s a way to honor our experience as survivors of the wreckage. “If you need to scream, there’s a part at the end of this song where you can,” Hartzman quipped deceptively lightly before “Pick Up That Knife,” the final song of the festival set. “And it feels rea-lly-fu-cking-goooood…”