Wednesday release a video for ‘TV in the Gas Pump,’ the final single and closing song on their highly anticipated upcoming album Rat Saw God, out April 7th via Dead Oceans.
“This is the first song I’ve written about being on the road, and I really just wanted to collect all that imagery you ingest on tour,” Karly Hartzman explains. “A few images that made it in the song include: the never ending gas station stops that blend together and the dystopian gas pump advertisements, a stressful experience in a Panera bread and a story of coming up from taking what you thought was a microdose of shrooms in a Dollar General.“
Of the video, its director, Lewis Dahm, says “This video is a result of Karly’s sicko vision of the Arresting Beauty of the American South. That vision was digitized by local freak-on-a-leash Lewis Dahm.”
The bandwere just named Billboard Magazine’s Must-Hear Indie Artist of the Month.
Last month the band shared a PJ Harvey-inspired video for “Bath County,” a song that Rolling Stone said “epitomizes Hartzman’s strengths as a storyteller and songwriter, as well as Wednesday’s charged, southern-fried indie rock.” Both of the album’s previous two singles “Chosen To Deserve” and “Bull Believer” received the coveted Best New Track distinction from Pitchfork, who called the band “honest chroniclers of the Southern everyday, surveying a no-frills landscape of ashen Dairy Queens, run-over dogs, and pissed-on wallpaper. Their stories will make you laugh, wince, recoil, and reminisce.”
WATCH THE PREVIOUSLY RELEASED VIDEOS FOR
“CHOSEN TO DESERVE” & “BULL BELIEVER”
& “BATH COUNTY”
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.
Wednesday is Karly Hartzman, MJ Lenderman, Alan Miller, and Xandy Chelmis.
- Hot Grass Smell
- Bull Believer
- Got Shocked
- Formula One
- Chosen To Deserve
- Bath County
- Quarry
- Turkey Vultures
- What’s So Funny
- TV in the Gas Pump
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