Wednesday

Blending the great fuzzy guitars of shoegaze with a faint Southern twang and lyrics fixated on the traumas of small-town life, Wednesday are an indie rock band from Asheville, North Carolina led by songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist Karly Hartzman. The group’s songs manage to be deeply personal while touching on doubts and anxieties that are universally recognizable, and after launching Wednesday as a solo project with 2017′s I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone, Hartzman transformed it into a full five-piece band on 2021′s Twin Plagues, with a fuller and more evocative sound. After signing with the noted indie label Dead Oceans, Wednesday’s music became bigger and more emotionally powerful on 2023′s Rat Saw God. Karly Hartzman was born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina. Her parents encouraged her to use music as a creative outlet when she was young, and her father gave her a ukulele when she was in middle school. Hartzman taught herself to play the uke, and she would later follow suit with guitar and other instruments, eager to make music but uncertain of how to make that happen. After graduating from high school, where she would often ditch class to spend time writing and drawing, Hartzman moved to Asheville to enroll in college, and she took a more serious approach to music as she soaked up the influences of punk bands, noise rock, and country radio. In 2017, with help from friends at a campus recording studio, Hartzman cut an album’s worth of songs under the group name Wednesday, a play on the British dream pop act the Sundays. I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone was a fusion of dream pop, indie rock, and shoegaze, and she initially gave it a low-key digital release. As she plotted her next move, Hartzman joined the band Diva Sweetly as lead singer, whose style leaned more toward pop-punk than the more dramatic sound of her own music. While Diva Sweetly began enjoying regional success, Hartzman wanted to focus on her own music, so she recruited a band to revamp the Wednesday concept. Joining Hartzman were lead guitarist MJ Lenderman, lap steel guitarist Xandy Chelmis, bassist Margo Schultz, and drummer Alan Miller. After the Chicago-based Orindal label gave I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone a vinyl reissue in 2020, Wednesday’s new lineup started work on an album, and Orindal issued Twin Plagues in 2021. The indie music press took notice of the album, and as Wednesday’s popularity grew in the United States and England, they self-released a nine-song EP, Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ’em Up, featuring covers of tunes by Roger Miller, Chris Bell, the Drive-By Truckers, Vic Chesnutt, and others. Dead Oceans, the successful indie label whose roster included Japanese Breakfast, Phoebe Bridgers, and Akron/Family, struck a deal with Wednesday to release their next album, and with producer Alex Farrar (Snail Mail, Suki Waterhouse, Archers of Loaf), the group cut their third album, 2023’s Rat Saw God, their hardest and most dynamic effort to date. ~ Mark Deming