The last time Fleetwood Mac performed “Silver Springs” was in 2015. Onstage in Auckland, Stevie Nicks sang the timeless breakup ballad she had written decades earlier, while Lindsey Buckingham—the song’s subject—stood only a few feet away, harmonizing. It was another fragile moment in the band’s long history of creative tension and personal fallout. So when MJ Lenderman revealed in a recent GQ profile that his final show with Wednesday had already come and gone, it wasn’t entirely shocking. After a whirlwind 2024—five tours, a solo album (Manning Fireworks), and the end of his relationship with frontwoman Karly Hartzman—something had to give.
On “Chosen to Deserve,” the fiery centerpiece of Wednesday’s 2023 breakthrough Rat Saw God, Hartzman sang about her messy younger years—“just so you know what you signed up for.” That same vulnerability burns brighter, and bleeds deeper, on Wednesday’s new album, Bleeds. Across twelve tracks, Hartzman sifts through heartbreak, regret, and resilience, her voice snagging on jagged guitars and trembling lap steel. The record’s world is grimy and vivid—full of dive bars, bad habits, and dark humor—but beneath it all runs a single thread of loss. Though Bleeds isn’t a breakup record in the literal sense, it radiates the pain of separation. The men in its stories blur into one—a “golden boy” who walks away unscathed, leaving Hartzman to pick through the wreckage. When she finally sings directly to Lenderman on “Elderberry Wine,” the result is piercing: “Said I wanna have your baby / Cause I freckle and you tan.”
Two years of relentless touring have sharpened Hartzman’s voice into a weapon. On “Wasp,” she howls with hardcore ferocity, while on “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On),” her cries evoke an animal caught in a trap—painful but alive. Yet her songwriting remains tender and deeply human, shaped by empathy and keen observation. She fills Bleeds with unforgettable images: “Threw up in the pit at the Death Grips show,” “Grocery store sushi,” “Weeds growing into the springs of the trampoline.” After years of comparison to others, Hartzman has become wholly herself. Bleeds feels like both a personal reckoning and an artistic renewal—burning down what came before to make something new from the ashes.
Despite the emotional rupture at its core, Wednesday have never sounded tighter. Hartzman and Lenderman didn’t tell the rest of the band about their breakup while recording, but its tension hangs in the air, powering the loud-quiet-loud swings of “Reality TV Argument Bleeds” and the explosive chorus of “Townies.” “Pick Up That Knife” begins as raw grunge before swelling into a triumphant country-rock anthem, Hartzman’s voice shifting from defiance to joy as the guitars roar skyward.
If Rat Saw God was Wednesday’s arrival on the indie main stage, Bleeds feels like a return to their roots. Produced again by Alex Farrar, it trades polish for intimacy—pressing close to the mic, letting every breath and crack in Hartzman’s voice show. Old characters reappear, like Gary from Twin Plagues’ “Gary’s,” now resurrected in “Gary’s II,” a violent yet oddly comic bluegrass tale. Ending the record with gossip and grit feels fitting: it’s Hartzman’s way of grounding heartbreak in the place that shaped her.
“The more I travel, the more obsessed I am with where I’m from,” she recently told The New Yorker. Bleeds is, at its heart, a love letter to home—specifically to Gary King, a beloved figure in the Asheville scene who died in 2022, and to Haw Creek, the 27-acre property that nurtured the band’s beginnings. Within that small, cluttered house, two people once shared love, music, and heartbreak. Like Nicks and Buckingham still reaching across the stage decades later, Hartzman and Lenderman remain bound by what they created together. The music carries on. The wound, like the title says, still bleeds.
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