Noisy indie-rockers Wednesday have announced their new album, Bleeds. The follow-up to 2023’s Rat Saw God arrives September 19 via Dead Oceans. The Asheville, North Carolina, band has also shared the new song “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)” and an accompanying music video by Joriel Cura. Watch it below.
“This song is inspired by a story my friend told me, from when he had to pull a body out of a creek in West Virginia. Someone had drowned but they took a few days to resurface because of the current,” Wednesday leader Karly Hartzman explained in a press release. “‘I wound up here by holdin on’ is a line from my friend Evan Gray’s poetry book: Thickets Swamped in a Fence-Coated Briars. He gave me and Jake [Lenderman] a copy of it to read on tour once, and that line stuck out to me as pure genius, so I stole it and wrote the rest of the song in my own words around it.”
Spanning 12 songs, including the previously released “Elderberry Wine,” Bleeds was recorded at Drop of Sun in Asheville. It was there that the Southern rock five-piece—singer-guitarist Karly Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, lap steel and pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis, bassist and pianist Ethan Baechtold, and drummer Alan Miller—reunited with Rat Saw God and Twin Plagues producer Alex Farrar.
Shortly after releasing their upcoming album, Wednesday will embark on a North American tour. Support along that run includes Friendship, on the West Coast leg, and Daffo, on the East Coast. Lenderman recently revealed that, while he remains a member of Wednesday in the recording studio, he will no longer tour with the band. His most recent solo album, Manning Fireworks, came out last autumn.
Wednesday recently made their television debut, performing “Elderberry Wine” on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. It followed Lenderman and Hartzman’s 2024 performance of Lenderman’s “Wristwatch” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
Revisit the interview “Wednesday’s Curdled Beauty” and read about Rat Saw God at No. 32 in “The 100 Best Albums of the 2020s So Far.”
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Bleeds:
01 Reality TV Argument Bleeds
02 Townies
03 Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)
04 Elderberry Wine
05 Phish Pepsi
06 Candy Breath
07 The Way Love Goes
08 Pick Up That Knife
09 Wasp
10 Bitter Everyday
11 Carolina Murder Suicide
12 Gary’s II