Tuesday, March 31, 2026

DSP Shows presents Wednesday  live in Asbury Hall with special guest Gouge Away 

7pm Doors, 8pm Show

Tickets: On sale Fri 9/26 @10am EST.  General Admission Standing: $26 advance, $31 day of show at TixR.com (online convenience fees will apply) or in person at the Babeville Box Office M-F 11a-5p (in person: fee free cash sales, 3% credit/debit card fee)

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. 

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Can a self-portrait be a collage? Can empathy be autobiographical? What’s the point of living if we’re
not trying to understand all the horror and humor that surrounds everything? These are a few of the
questions lurking under the bleachers of Wednesday’s new album Bleeds, an intoxicating collection of narrative-heavy Southern rock that—like many of the most arresting passages from the North
Carolina band’s highlight reel so far—thoughtfully explores the vivid link between curiosity and
confession.
Bleeds is not only the best Wednesday record—it’s also the most Wednesday record, a patchwork-styletriumph of literary allusions and outlaw grit, of place-based poetry and hair-raising noise. Karly
Hartzman—founder, frontwoman, and primary lyricist—credits Wednesday’s tightened grasp on
their own identity to time spent collaborating on previous albums, plus a tour schedule that’s been
both rewarding and relentless. “Bleeds is the spiritual successor to Rat Saw God, and I think the
quintessential ‘Wednesday Creek Rock’ album,” Hartzman said, articulating satisfaction with the
ways her band has sharpened its trademark sound, how they’ve refined the formula that makes them
one of the most interesting rock bands of their generation. “This is what Wednesday songs are
supposed to sound like,” she said. “We’ve devoted a lot of our lives to figuring this out—and I feel
like we did.”
Just like Rat Saw God, one of the defining rock & roll records of the 2020s so far, Bleeds came
together at Drop of Sun in Asheville and was produced by Alex Farrar, who’s been recording the
band since Twin Plagues. Hartzman again brought demos to the studio, where she and her
bandmates—Xandy Chelmis (lap steel, pedal steel), Alan Miller (drums), Ethan Baechtold (bass,
piano), and Jake “M.J.” Lenderman (guitar)—worked as a team to bulk-up the compositions with the
exact right amounts of country truth-telling, indie-pop hooks, and noisy sludge. More than ever, the
precise proportions were steered by the lyricism—not only its tone or subject matter, but also the
actual sound of the words, as well as Hartzman’s masterfully subjective approach to detail selection.
Whether she’s purging her fascination with a gruesome true-crime case (“Carolina Murder Suicide”)
or recounting why her old landlord Gary got dentures at thirty-three (“Gary’s II”), every image or
scene is filtered through Hartzman’s agile, writerly brain. The particulars deemed essential—a
wincing dentist, a crooked nail, a Pitbull puppy pissing off a balcony—all contain revelations about
Hartzman’s specific obsessions and vulnerabilities, about the fragmented way she processes the
world. She confronts this affinity for interpersonal soul-searching on “Townies,” remembering a
high-school mischief partner whose sexual adventures triggered nasty gossip: “Off I-40 / crawled
into your life begging on my knees / and I get it now / you were sixteen and bored and drunk.”
Maybe sometimes the best way to locate truth or pain or dignity within your own life story, Bleeds
suggests, is by crawling into someone else’s.

Not long before the first Bleeds sessions, Hartzman and Jake Lenderman ended the romantic part of
their relationship. Worried about disrupting the group’s hard-earned synergy, the pair hid this
development from the rest of Wednesday until the album was done. Written entirely pre-breakup,
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!