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Wednesday's Bleeds heroically slams thick fuzz and authentic vignettes into powerful full-length

by Overdrive Clive – 08 July 2026

From the first fuzzy twang this album unapologetically (and deservedly) demands all the attention available in whatever sonic space you're in. The infectious melodies are little communicable disease kisses, but the fashionable kind.

Bleeds is attractive, yet also clearly doesn’t give a shit if I listen to it or not. Karly Hartzman, Wendesday's frontperson, and the brain behind the corner-store delirium that is Bleeds has a banshee scream hidden and wrapped in a sour patch kid vocal. She’s got all the swagger of a chart-topper and all the innocent quirks of a local gutter punk.

“Reality TV Argument Bleeds” sets the irreverent tone for the record. It makes it easy to feel like a teen again in the backseat of a shitty car, head out the window like a mongrel lab on the way to the seashore (but the water is too cold and there’s trash everywhere when you get there). Yet somehow the moonlight glinting off of the green plastic bottles surrounded by spent syringes is captivating.

“I don’t feel like being comforted,” rejects the missive often misbestowed on angsty girls—I really feel Karly rejecting the way society is while simultaneously embracing the reality of—well—reality.

That’s the thing. This album is dutifully frank. It makes you uncomfortable in a good and necessary way. In hit song "Townies" Hartzman oozes,

You sent the nudes around
I never guilted you about it
‘Cause you died

and that functions on a really deep, powerful level. That’s reality for people now—especially young women. Technology is a beast with gnashing teeth, and we're all its vulnerable prey.

Bleeds has a theme of underlying, unrecognized life challenges, and merges this with a deep acceptance of the reality that life is full of stupid painful moments.

But sometimes the trip to the dump, the seedy dive bar, the sand dune behind the vape shop, the broken glass oasis in the local park—these can be sacred spaces of immense growth and identity building. At the end of "Townies" the bridge is the melodic riff reprised at half speed. Hartzman steps out and stretches her vape-strained vocal into a beautiful glistening spiderweb that encompasses cheap experience and deep meaning.

Hartzman's pen acts like another's camera might: “you saw a pit bull puppy pissing off the balcony,” “stoking bonfires with leaf blowers”—and in “Elderberry Wine” she opens with “sweet song is a long con / I drove you to the airport with the e-brake on,” which of course captures that elusive moment when a well-meaning person is doing everything right but still manages to fuck something up.

The images don’t let up as you slosh though the record. Several versions of “Phish Pepsi” exist, but the one on Bleeds I think is the best. It’s a grimy country-esque novela of a song over way before all the drawn shades are peeped out of. “We watched a Phish concert and Human Centipede / Two things I now wish I’d never seen,” perfectly captures getting stoned out of a Pepsi can and having the first few realizations that may eventually turn into crippling anxiety.

When Hartzman steps on the fuzz box, M.J. Lenderman anchors the sonic side of the band wonderfully. Lenderman and Hartzman handily deliver sonic blasts and rock out.

In “Candy Breath” Hartzman paints a lusty picture of modern non-committal relationships like a sage. She grapples with relationships in the same way she treats drugs, parties, booze, bars, bonfires: with her bare hands.

Knocking on that screen door
Even though I can see right through
Feel like I’m almost good enough to know you

lays bare Hartzman’s own struggles in a stark way. I like seeing the world through her eyes. It is relieving somehow experience her uncensored thoughts—it's almost like she's speaking for so many women in my life. She gives us an insightful gift with Bleeds. She is hellbent on telling it like it is, and we are better off for it.

In a world where we seldom encounter transparency, Hartzman’s songs are fresh as rain, even if the rain is actually dog piss dripping down from the apartment above.

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