Wednesday On Their Indie Rock Success And Latest LP ‘Rat Saw God’

On a Saturday afternoon in early April, a long line of people stood outside of the music venue TV Eye in the Ridgewood section of Queens, New York, hoping to see indie rock band Wednesday perform a free show. It was the main attraction of the one-off “Mr. Rat’s Flea Market,” held in TV Eye’s outdoor area, that sold such goods as used records, apparel and artwork. Both the flea market and the free concert coincided with the release of Wednesday’s latest album, Rat Saw God, the day before.

Meanwhile, those fans who were lucky enough to already to be inside TV Eye packed the small performance space by the time the members of Wednesday—singer/guitarist Karly Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, lap steel player Xandy Chelmis, drummer Alan Miller and bassist Ethan Baechtold—came on stage. Leading up to that show, a lot of buzz had surrounded Wednesday when Rat Saw God garnered critical acclaim from fans and the press for its country-meets-shoegaze sound. But despite the heavy attention lavished on the band, Hartzman, the band’s chief songwriter, is taking it all in stride.

“I’m kind of letting it wash over me,” she says during a recent interview via Zoom alongside bandmates Chelmis and Lendermen, “but also I don’t want it to get in the way of whatever we do next. So I’m highly appreciative of it, but also kind of letting it come and go. I don’t want it to mess it all with my interpretation of how I write: ‘Do I make another Rat Saw God?’ ‘Do I make another blah blah blah.’ I never want that to get in the way of whatever we do. I’m gonna write the same way I wrote this album, which is however the f*** I want, no matter what reception is like.”

Rat Saw God is the follow-up to 2021’s Twin Plagues, Wednesday’s second album; it is also the Asheville, North Carolina band’s debut release for the indie label Dead Oceans, whose roster includes Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski and Japanese Breakfast. The new record marks a progression for the quintent in terms of both musicianship and songwriting, according to Hartzman. “I feel like each album is a pretty big leap for me with my relationship to guitar,” she says, “and being able to make the songs that I’ve imagined in my mind for a long time, because it’s taken me a really long time for my skills to catch up to my ideal songwriting. So I feel like that’s become really a lot more fully realized on this one.”

“It’s definitely a big step,” says Chelmis. “The way it came together was just so much more effortless, and it feels like we all had an understanding sort of what we’re trying to do more so with this album than the others, for sure.” Adds Lenderman: “It took a lot less time to make than Twin Plagues. Twin Plagues was like 10 to 14 days of rehearsal, and then 10 days of recording. This [Rat Saw God] was maybe one or two days of rehearsal and six days of recording.”

Often mentioned in press coverage about Wednesday is the group’s ‘countrygaze’ sound, although from listening to the new album, one could also detect some folk, grunge and post-punk in the mix. “I don’t think I fully felt committed to any of those genre tags,” Hartzman explains. “I actually saw something really recently–and this was just like some Internet video–but that Gen Z is becoming less concerned with genre as a whole. They’re listening to whatever they like. So I feel like genre is starting to get into this different place where people like what they like, and it’s music. Trying to assign different names to stuff is becoming kind of a battle that’s unwinnable, ’cause all people really do at the end of the day is argue about it.”

In a previous interview with Stereogum, Hartzman mentioned Loudon Wainwright III, Lynda Barry’s novel Cruddy, Drive-By Truckers, and her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina as some of the influences behind Rat Saw God. Rendered with both melancholy and humor, Hartzman’s semi-autobiographical lyrics drew from her upbringing in the South and observations of the everyday lives of the region’s denizens—almost like indie rock’s version of Flannery O’Connor. “I would say the theme overall is trying to do our home justice and our family’s stories justice,” Hartzman says now, “and try to create an accurate poetic interpretation of our lives as they are now. I do think it’s important to establish where all sorts of people making music are coming from for any given time period. So I feel like I’m trying to do my best to represent what it is for our little slice of humanity.”

There are examples on Rat Saw God where Hartzman melds both her family’s experiences and observations of others, via the melodic “Quarry”—with such lyrics as “Georgie set fire to acres of cotton settin’ off model rockets/The kid from the Jewish family got the preacher’s kid pregnant” and “The Kletz brothers parents fight in the yard in their underwear/Bobby and Jimmy sit in the baby pool with lice in their hair.”

“I love a good story,” Hartzman says of “Quarry,” “and I love especially some of my dad’s from his youth are really entertaining and I’ve been hearing them for a long time. I was excited for an opportunity to share them through song—the one about him burning down the field, and then the one about my uncle getting the preacher’s daughter pregnant was something I had heard in the last year. It was one of those stories that I guess I realized I’m old enough to hear this type of thing about my family now—because you know you have to earn some stories with age. And so I kind of have within one verse an old story and a new story that I had earned, I guess, by being a Hartzman, which felt really special. I guess it’s a little sacrilegious to share that after having earned their trust with them. But luckily, I made sure to get everyone’s OK before like putting that information out there and stuff.”

Then there’s “Bath County,” which was born out of a trip that Hartzman and Lenderman took together that included a visit to Dollywood (One of Hartzman’s real-life observations during that trip led to this particular lyric in the song: “Heard someone died in the Planet Fitness parking lot/Fire trucks rolled in and people stood around”). Aside from such other standout tracks as “Chosen to Deserve” and “What’s So Funny,” the centerpiece of the record is the furious and turbulent eight-minute track “Bull Believer”—a two-part song whose themes include addiction and memories of being a teenager playing the video game Mortal Kombat with friends at a New Year’s Eve party. Heard at the end of this intense song are Hartzman’s screaming vocals that send chills up the spine.

“I’ve wanted to do a screaming vocal for a long time,” she says. “I’ve been trying to work my way up to it. I had this feeling in my mind where there’s something specific that I’ve wanted to scream about for a long time that happened when I was in high school that I really needed to write about first. And it’s what I end up tackling in “Bull Believer.” I felt like I won’t be able to unleash this beast that it takes to come out for a screaming vocal on a song unless I prioritize what I need to let go of first. “Bull Believer” was really just like a bridge I had to cross to get to where I wanna go with screaming in the future, and it ended up obviously being a really intense output.”

“I love performing that song,” says Chelmis to his bandmates. “I loved composing it too with y’all and figuring out how to move from one part to the other, because performing it sort of feels like a journey and you’re like a roller coaster coming up and coming down and then coming around to this big finish that really feels good to hit for me.”

“It’s fun to play,” adds Lenderman. “I feel like I get to explore sounds and parts of the guitar that I don’t usually in other songs. And then by the end of the song, it’s pretty cathartic for us, too. I feel like I really feed off of whatever Karly’s doing.”

Wednesday started in 2017 as Hartzman’s solo music project before the singer-songwriter added musicians for live performances. “I was writing songs and having my friend Daniel record them at the school we went to,” she recalls. “I didn’t plan on forming a band really at all. I wanted to try my hand at songwriting. But then my sister is like, ‘You should play my birthday party,’ and then I got a band together to do that one thing. We just kept going and adding in members and switching out people. I’m really glad we had a long time to settle into our sound and our perfect lineup as much as it was hard to grind in the DIY scene for a while. I really don’t think our Wednesday-ness would have really solidified if we hadn’t had years to do it and figure out what exactly we wanted to be and how we wanted to write.”

Judging from the band members’ interactions with each other in their music videos and live performances, the dynamic within Wednesday is more of a group of friends who are also musicians rather than the other way around. Says Hartzman: The more I kind of realized how—like, I’m doing this with my best friends on Earth, and the more I do it and I’m around them 24 hours a day, I’m like, ‘How does any band that’s not best friends like this do this?’ Because you’re literally around each other constantly. Your personalities have to really mesh on stage and off. I couldn’t do without doing this with my best friends. There’s no one else I’d rather share this with.”

“The closeness on tour has brought me closer to y’all than most anyone else in my life,” says Chelmis. “I’m always wondering if that’s because we’re really good friends or we’ve learned to be friends by the sheer fact of doing this together. It’s like the chicken or the egg as there’s no way to know. But it’s tight-knit.” And adds Lenderman: “I don’t think it works if we didn’t love each other.”

Wednesday are currently touring through August and playing parts of North America and Europe. Meanwhile, Hartzman already has written new songs for the band’s next record. Asked whether that record will follow in the same vein as Rat Saw God, Hartzman says: “I have a very specific style, so I think it’s consistent with that. And I get better with every album too, because I’m learning how to write still. But I think the real growth is gonna come when I do bring these songs to my bandmates, and they get to interpret it with their ears and whatever–it could be anything. That’s my favorite part of having these really bare-bones songs and letting them go crazy on them because I love the way they interpret what I’m trying to do.”