“One of the most compelling indie rock bands in America.” –Pitchfork
“Rat Saw God is Wednesday’s third album and may be one of the biggest of 2023.” -NPR
“Wednesday’s coronation as one of the best bands in indie rock feels complete.” -Stereogum
“Position[s] the band as both impressively ambitious and intimate storytellers alike” -The FADER
“One of the most-anticipated albums of 2023… The production is tight, the guitar work is immense and Karly Hartzman’s vocals are aweing” -Paste
“It’s drenched in reverb and bandleader Karly Hartzman’s vocals are hypnotic, somehow simultaneously fragile and strong” -UPROXX
Wednesday release a video for ‘Bath County,’ the driving new single from their highly awaited new album Rat Saw God, out April 7th via Dead Oceans.
“This is a song I wrote on a porch in Bath County, Virginia when me and [lead guitarist] Jake [Lenderman] were visiting Jake’s moms hometown. It includes some imagery I saw on that trip as well as a description of a guy we saw overdosed in a parking lot early one morning on our way to Dollywood,” Karly Hartzman explains.
Of the video, which Hartzman also directed, she says “The video I made myself is an homage to PJ Harvey’s video for ‘Man-Size.’ I’ve never seen someone emit as much confidence as she does in that video. I wanted to pretend for a minute I possessed that attitude but it was harder than it looks! Endless respect for Peej.”
Both of the album’s previously released singles, “Chosen To Deserve” and “Bull Believer,” have been awarded the coveted Best New Track distinction from Pitchfork who also profiled the band called them “one of the most compelling indie rock bands in America,” with NPR predicting the Rat Saw God “may be one of the biggest [albums] of 2023.”
Wednesday is Karly Hartzman, MJ Lenderman, Alan Miller, and Xandy Chelmis.
WATCH THE PREVIOUSLY RELEASED VIDEOS FOR
& ‘BULL BELIEVER‘
A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din.
Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything.
Rat Saw God was written in the months immediately following Twin Plagues’ completion, and recorded in a week at Asheville’s Drop of Sun studio. While Twin Plagues was a breakthrough release critically for Wednesday, it was also a creative and personal breakthrough for Hartzman. The lauded record charts feeling really fucked up, trauma, dropping acid. It had Hartzman thinking about the listener, about her mom hearing those songs, about how it feels to really spill your guts. And in the end, it felt okay. “I really jumped that hurdle with Twin Plagues where I was not worrying at all really about being vulnerable – I was finally comfortable with it, and I really wanna stay in that zone.”
The songs on Rat Saw God don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.”
But the thing about Rat Saw God – and about any Wednesday song, really – is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.
1. Hot Grass Smell
2. Bull Believer
3. Got Shocked
4. Formula One
5. Chosen To Deserve
6. Bath County
7. Quarry
8. Turkey Vultures
9. What’s So Funny
10. TV in the Gas Pump
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