Karly Hartzman on Wednesday’s cathartic new album ‘Bleeds’: “My songwriting process is the most therapeutic part of my life”

“The cool thing about a love song is that it’s forever,” Karly Hartzman says, nursing a hot black coffee and croissant. “Even if it was written about my bandmate, Jake, before we broke up, it’s kind of universal in a lot of ways.”

The Wednesday frontwoman is in London for a whistle-stop tour of acoustic live shows, interview junkets and a surprise appearance with bandmate and ex-boyfriend MJ Lenderman – aka Jake – at the Roundhouse. Despite the jet lag she’s fighting off when she meets NME in the cafe of her London hotel, now is an exciting time for Hartzman. Her band scored critical acclaim for their 2023 record ‘Rat Saw God’, which NME called “one of the year’s defining rock albums”. Now they’re back with its follow-up ‘Bleeds’ – an album that bridges the gap between personal confessions and documentation of modern life in North Carolina.

The new record is Wednesday at their tightest, Hartzman’s vivid lyrics bolstered by noisy sludges, classic indie hooks and country-inflected bursts of energy. Lyrically, the record plays like an archive: stories Hartzman picked up from neighbours, friends, and acquaintances are woven together with her own experiences, delivered as though each memory belonged to her. It also carries fragments of her past relationship with Lenderman, most clearly on the bittersweet, finger-plucked ballad ‘The Way Love Goes.’

“They were written over a year or two, and then recorded just a month after Jake and I broke up. It’s such a crazy experience, but I’m kind of thankful for it,” she explains. There’s no bad blood between Lenderman and Hartzman; she still calls him the writer of some of her favourite songs. “Looking back, I think it’ll have helped me process a lot, now, and I think more critically about the way love works in my life.”

Naturally, some songs have shifted in meaning, as Hartzman adopts more of a storyteller’s role. Performing the new material feels, at times, like leafing through old photographs; there’s a detachment to them now. “‘Elderberry Wine’ can almost pass as a happy song because of how it sounds,” she says. “I think it would be kind of re-traumatising to put myself back in my own shoes, as I was at the time, every night on stage. But I dip my toe in to make sure it still feels authentic.

“I’ve yet to play ‘The Way Love Goes’. We’ll see if the crowd can handle it. I think it would be hard to perform to an audience that wasn’t receptive, because it’s such a vulnerable moment. There’s a chance I won’t play it live… I don’t want to feel uncomfortable on stage either.”

Initially, the pair kept their split quiet from their bandmates while finishing the recording of ‘Bleeds’, not wanting to unsettle the process. “I just desperately wanted to make sure we were capturing the way the band had been operating before that,” she says. “I didn’t want to mess with that dynamic, but they mostly knew. But because we’re best friends, once we relayed the news, they were mostly just relieved for us.”

Keeping her private life quiet is Hartzman’s preferred approach. You won’t find her on social media, and she’s moved to a bucolic countryside area to maintain a “normal” life. So, having to explain her breakup, first to the band and then to the rest of the world, feels a little weird. “I think about if I were online and I saw anyone who had something to say about it, I’d be like, ‘how would that person feel if I asked them about their relationship?’” she remarks. “It’s so funny, the way that it’s, like, different, if you’re sort of a public person.”

“With each album, I try to challenge myself to do something I haven’t done yet”

Staying offline helps her not just avoid gossip about her love life, but also stops her comparing herself to her peers and feeling pressure to replicate the success of ‘Rat Saw God’. “I get to be like Hannah Montana,” she jokes. “I can put everything, all of the compliments and the positivity, more into the music, rather than feeding back into myself. I think if those two worlds mix more, it might fuck with my head.”

Hartzman’s songwriting is deeply narrative, gripping the listener with raw, often grisly details. She cites Richard Brautigan and cartoonist Lynda Barry as inspirations for her style of simplistic yet heavily detailed and, ultimately, beautiful storytelling. Her passion for photography feeds into the same instinct, as she finds herself constantly scanning for details that might one day find their way into a song.

This comes through most clearly on the album’s closer, ‘Gary’s II’, written about Hartzman’s former landlord and neighbour, an elderly man she’d often chat with on the stoop of a friend’s house. The story follows his unfortunate run-in with a local who whacked him over the head with a baseball bat, resulting in him having a mouth full of dentures by 33.

Gary has since passed away, but the song serves as a cheerful tribute. “He was always smoking a cigarette with his oxygen tank in,” she recalls. “So you’d just kind of be terrified while he’s telling you these stories. But he experienced the town that we live in 70 years ago, and it’s nothing like it used to be. So just hearing that, having a connection to a man that age, that isn’t family, is really interesting. He’s choosing to be there and share with us; it’s not unconditional love, and it just means a lot for that reason. I’ll probably write songs about him for a really long time.”

Hartzman’s sense of empathy literally bleeds through the verses of each song, as demonstrated in ‘Townies’, written for a friend who was subjected to rumours while growing up. The lines “You sent my nudes around / I never yelled at you about it, ‘cause you / Died” are particularly poignant for anyone who experienced leaked nudes or slut-shaming as a teenager.

“She wasn’t holding on to the anger at those people, but you know how sometimes you’re more defensive of your friend than yourself?” she laughs. “I feel like it was just nice to tell someone that someone loves you, ‘I feel this deeply about something that happened in high school’, and I think that dynamic is really interesting. It was a fascinating thing to think about how people interpret women being ‘promiscuous’.”

This feeds into the magic of how ‘Bleeds’ comes together. Though it’s a series of vignettes, there’s an unexpected cohesion to it all. Hartzman acknowledges this as a sort of happy accident, and something that only happens when writing from the heart. There’s an instinctive nature to how the band plays, which Hartzman calls a ‘telepathy’, finessed through years of experimentation together, complementing her distinctive lyricism. “I think my songwriting process is the most therapeutic part of my life,” she says.

Wednesday follow a classic country blueprint in terms of lyrical content, but the band have been more synonymous with experimental, underground indie scenes for the best part of a decade now. Famed for their riotous live shows, where Hartzman is often screaming (because “there’s so much to be angry about”) against a maelstrom of lap guitars, pummelling drum beats and fuzzing guitar riffs, the group have finally managed to capture a sound that feels distinctly theirs.

“We’ve been a band for almost nine years now, and it’s taken that long for me to feel like I’m writing my dream music”

She’s also been open about pushing herself vocally, introducing new layers and textures to her voice. Fans of ‘Rat Saw God’ will be well familiar with the gutteral scream on ‘Bull Believer’ which gets a neat follow-up in the form of ‘Wasp’, where Hartzman yells the lines, “Canary shrieks and screams and spits / I’m stuck down here inside the lift / I’m sick, can’t fuck, push the paint around / Castrated in my mental death.”

“With each album, I try to challenge myself to do something I haven’t done yet, and the goal was to scream a song in its entirety for the first time,” the 28-year-old explains. “I don’t know where to go from there, challenge-wise. I guess it’d be a whole album of screaming.”

Right now, Wednesday really are riding a natural high. They’ve created something that feels authentic, resonating with fans and drawing praise from critics, even if that isn’t where their focus lies. “I finally gained the experience to create the songs I felt like I deserved,” Hartzman reflects. “Someone asked me recently how much raw talent it takes to do what we do, and I said 99 per cent of it has just been playing a lot and writing a lot. It wasn’t inherent. We’ve been a band for almost nine years now, and it’s taken that long for me to feel like I’m writing my dream music.”

Hartzman is determined to keep things low-key and offline when it comes to her personal life. But you’ll still hear snippets of her emotions, accurately conveyed by illustrative songwriting and the natural tightness of a band that’s endured a decade of grafting. This is a positive time for her, even if she does have to talk to strangers about her ex-boyfriend.

Wednesday’s ‘Bleeds’ is out on September 19 via Dead Oceans

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