When does a comfort become a crutch? “You keep on feeding that Afrin addiction,” Karly Hartzman sighs halfway through Wednesday’s “Pick Up That Knife,” “Squeezing the bottle and burning from itching.” If she’s chastising a pal for decongestant overreliance, it’s only in the way someone else at the bottom of the metaphorical bottle can. In the song’s first half, she’s already journeyed through a series of everyday annoyances—a cracked tooth, a bad parking spot, an imminent rent payment—that, when stacked on top of each other, start to feel like hell on earth. She knows how it feels to search for a way out: “One day,” she sings through gritted teeth, “I’ll kill the bitch inside my brain.”

Wednesday have a way of making hairpin turns through the melody-twang-noise continuum look effortless—and here, her bandmates mirror Hartzman’s despair: twinkly guitars give way to a full-band thrash before the group steadies into an easygoing strum. Towards the song’s end, Hartzman’s narrative fixates on a standoff with some bikers. “They’ll meet you outside,” she wails before a delightful cascade of guitar and pedal steel riffs take over. Hartzman sounds tough—or maybe just desperate—enough to take them.