Bleeds

While Bleeds may not have the monstrous impact of Rat Saw God, it’s a truly glorious follow-up with just as many moments of brilliance.

Throw in some of Hartzman’s stickiest, most affecting lyricism yet, and you’ve got an album that justifies every ounce of praise that’s been thrown Wednesday’s way.

Bleeds is a full cathartic release for both Wednesday and the listener, as the band creates a jam-packed tracklist that sheds raw honesty, imaginative imagery, and artistic maturity over warped distortion. The band is performing as if writing and recording these songs were the only way to differentiate dreams from reality.

Bleeds is another monumental statement from one of the most exciting bands working today, and certainly at the top of the shortlist of best records of the year.

We can surely welcome more bittersweet beauties like the steely "Elderberry Wine" and, in particular, "The Way Love Goes", Hartzman's very own "Silver Springs." [Oct 2025, p.35]

Her writing is as richly fetid as ever—replete with bar brawls, murder-suicides, Afrin addictions, and serial killers—but a bright red yarn of heartbreak wends its way between these songs, little cuts coming together to form one gaping wound.

The tragicomic takes a leading role on the band’s sixth album, which showcases its core songwriter sharpening her keen sensibilities as a preternaturally gifted raconteur. With more eyes and ears on Wednesday than ever, they don’t reinvent themselves for further mass appeal. Instead, Bleeds sees them truck ahead to refine their proven prowess.

The song ["Gary's II] highlights everything that makes Bleeds one of the most evocative albums of the year: violent, sympathetic, ominous.

Whether Bleeds marks the end of a nice run or the beginning of a legendary one remains to be seen, but for now, let’s just enjoy one of the stand-out releases of 2025.

Hartzman is at the peak of her songwriting on Bleeds, with instantly quotable lines both profound (“The easy things in life keep getting harder everyday”) and genuinely funny stoner escapades (“We watched a Phish concert and Human Centipede/Two things I now wish I had never seen”).

The new album presents songs of confession, reflection, wit, heartache and true crime in a new yet distinctive way.

Bleeds is an alt-rock urtext for Wednesday, both an entry point and a summation of their gifts: mixing the atonal with the blissful (Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)), bizarro choogle (Phish Pepsi), void-splitting hardcore (Wasp) and Low-esque slowcore (Carolina Murder Suicide).

Bringing some straight up country sounds to the mix broadens Hartzman’s palette and the added variety makes Bleeds an across the board winner. There’s truly something for everyone here.

Full of complicated emotions and sombre nostalgia, it confronts the darkness and the details, the granular and grandeur, the trivialities and the everything. That's just life, and that's just Wednesday: an exercise in horrible, wonderful contradiction.

Wednesday sound in total control of the world they've build here. [Nov 2025, p.85]

This slight maladroit as Wednesday’s styles jostle for attention doesn’t affect the record – and in fact, the ‘what we know now’ adds to the emotional heft Karly has already displayed a knack for conveying.

Wednesday know what they want to say, and how: Pouring their hearts out with reckless riffage to illustrate the agony and ecstasy of smalltown life.

Although Alex Farrar's production is slightly more refined, that only means vocalist Karly Hartzman's conspiratorial storytelling is crystal clear and the North Carolina band's musicianship is thrown in sharp relief. [Oct 2025, p.133]

One element tying everything together is Hartzman’s knack for melodies that zig and zag all over the scale in wonderfully unexpected ways.