Wednesday has partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 from every ticket sold will go to support local organizations addressing hunger and food insecurity in their communities.
the songs on Bleeds were already grappling with grief and memory and the hidden elegance of the
profane; the extent to which this compartmentalized heartache leaked into the final recordings is
right now unknowable, and might always be. One thing that is indisputable, however: Even without
considering its prescient overtones, the doomed romance of “The Way Love Goes” would’ve stung
like an open wound; Hartzman’s literal, doubt-filled poetry is delivered languidly over soft-focus
finger plucks and Chelmis’s mournful steel.
Hartzman’s distinct singing voice and its connection to her storytelling has always been at the heart
of Wednesday, and she stretches that instrument with remarkable flexibility across Bleeds: Her vocal
has never sounded sweeter than it does when she’s sentimentalizing pickled eggs on the twangy and
timeless-feeling “Elderberry Wine,” and it’s never sounded more corrosive than on “Wasp,” a
late-album sucker punch which has been rattling Wednesday crowds since the band started
performing it out last year. Hartzman full-on screams through the latter’s eighty-six-second runtime,
her figurative language distilled to its bleakest and most concise form: “My life is a spider web / built
into the doorway / When you walk in you duck your head / and the wind is always blowing.”
Hartzman’s not concerned with bettering her voice in a formal sense, with trying to make it sound
“good” against any conventional standards. Even now, as Wednesday’s visceral music reaches more
and more ears beyond the mountains of western North Carolina, Hartzman’s focus remains
challenging herself: reaching for a note she can’t quite hit, uncovering new textures while shrieking
over thick layers of melody and muck. She wants to keep trying things, and to keep archiving
evidence of that trying. At the end of “Wound Up Here,” while she’s sing-screaming the titular
refrain, which interpolates a line of writing by the Appalachian poet Evan Gray, Hartzman’s voice
breaks a little. “I love that part—it shows that there’s a place to go with the next album,” she said.
“It’s like a cliffhanger.”
Bleeds is a reminder that Hartzman and her bandmates are exclusively interested in chasing glory
through games they invent themselves—games with rulebooks you can only decipher late at night, in
that freaky and perfect place between sleep and awake where you’re not sure if you’re dreaming or
remembering something that already happened. In this arena of their imagination, the scoreboard’s a
neon bar sign, the commentator’s a cicada, the mascot is an eighty-year-old Pepsi addict with no
teeth. Wednesday is always World Champion, and the award hanging from Karly Hartzman’s neck
isn’t an Olympic gold but rather a heart-shaped pendant—a clunky, rust-stained heirloom with
countless funny and fucked-up stories locked safely inside.
Gouge Away opens the show!
Forming in South Florida with the intention to record a short EP and play one show, Gouge Away were driven by the need to write music and take a stab at topics they weren’t hearing in their local scene. They were influenced by bands like Fugazi, Unwound, The Jesus Lizard, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and Paint it Black.
A couple years later, they put out “, Dies” on local label, Eighty-Sixed Records, which they didn’t expect to reach beyond their hometown. After some touring, they released “Burnt Sugar” on Deathwish Inc. in 2018 which naturally took a more personal approach when Christina Michelle was dealing with her mom’s heart complications and misdiagnoses. Following the release of the album, they toured extensively throughout the US and beyond. While on tour and in their small pockets of downtime, they eagerly wrote and demoed songs for a third album, pulling influence not only from the nostalgia of the bands they grew up listening to, but developing and pushing the sense of urgency, noise, and introspective lyrics they felt most represented them.
Touring came to a halt in 2020, canceling a full year of plans in an instant. Gouge Away took time for themselves to move to different parts of the country and focus on their personal lives. On New Years Eve just beginning 2022, they decided it was time to revisit their demoed material, and to do it justice by allowing it to see the light of day.
They recorded with Jack Shirley at Atomic Garden East in March 2023, completely analog to tape and almost entirely live, without the use of a computer. The goal was to sound like five friends playing music in a room together, unpolished and far from being over-produced, which is what the heart of Gouge Away has always been.