Wednesday

Since 2017 · United States

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Rat Saw God (2023)

Rat Saw God pairs Wednesday's thick, distorted shoegaze guitar wall with Karly Hartzman's plainspoken, almost novelistic Southern storytelling. "Bull Believer" spends most of its long runtime as a slow, patiently building tension before erupting into a screamed, cathartic finale that earns its length by refusing to rush toward it. The lyrics favor sharp, specific detail over vague sentiment throughout, giving the noise something concrete and lived-in to hang onto. It remains the album that fully merged the band's atmospheric, shoegaze-indebted instincts with Hartzman's increasingly literary songwriting.

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Wednesday

Rat Saw God · 2023

Karly Hartzman leads Wednesday out of Asheville, North Carolina, having gotten her first musical experience singing in a synagogue choir before eventually building a sound she has described simply as an attempt "to make shoegaze with lyrics that are worth listening to." She has cited memoirist Mary Karr as a lyrical influence, and after hearing Drive-By Truckers' "Let There Be Rock," wrote "Chosen to Deserve" using her own memories to fill the same premise of describing a difficult childhood.

Rat Saw God, released in 2023, became the album that brought Wednesday its widest attention yet, arriving after several years of steady work sharpening the band's sound. MJ Lenderman, who also records solo, plays guitar in the band, one of several overlapping connections running through Asheville's small but increasingly visible songwriting scene, whose rising profile Wednesday has helped bring wider attention to.