Rat Saw God

When Karly Hartzman tells you “there’s a place where the kids go to kiss,” it’s just one stop on a long, weird tour. The line arrives in the closing verse of a song called “Handsome Man” from Wednesday’s 2021 album Twin Plagues, right after she points out how the wallpaper in the bathroom seems to “wince” while you piss. You get the sense she’s mentioning this place less as a starry-eyed invitation than for the sake of being comprehensive: It’s another spot to revisit, and plenty of people have written songs about it. There’s much more to see. 

Wednesday’s Curdled Beauty

How about, for example, the Planet Fitness where someone died in the parking lot? Or the fridge with the crickets behind it? Have you seen the sex shop with the biblical name? Or how about the house that turned out to be a mob front? You will find all these hidden, unloved locales scattered through Rat Saw God, Wednesday’s lightning bolt of a fifth album. So much writing about the quiet, lonely corners of America spends its time longing to break free, aching for something big to happen. Hartzman’s characters have no great plans and nowhere to go, so they wind up luxuriating in the quiet and the loneliness as Hartzman traffics in the casual poetry of people who share enough in common to skip the pleasantries. “We always started by telling our best stories first,” she sings. “So now that it’s been a while I’ll get to tellin’ you all my worst.”

The same way Hartzman can guide you through a landscape that subtly grows as familiar as the one where you grew up, she sometimes gives the sense that you’re poring through her books and record collection, sitting beside her as she recites the underlined passages. In her lyrics, there are quotes from fiction writers George Saunders and Richard Brautigan; shout-outs to Bill Callahan and Drive-By Truckers. These are lofty comparisons, but Wednesday have the ambition to make these masters feel not only like peers but also like neighbors in their mythological hometown.

As Hartzman’s lyrics delve deeper into a rich, suburban mundanity, her bandmates respond with their most dramatic and explosive performances. Listen casually and you will hear a killer rock band raised on alternative landmarks from the ’90s and early ’00s; listen closer and the woozy, grainy performances speak a language all their own. Some songs play like nonstop crescendos, starting at a steady rumble and only gaining speed, like the eight-minute “Bull Believer.” Others take you on a journey from twinkly ambience to reckless, pile-driving rock, as in the awestruck “Turkey Vultures.” This dynamic sound, propelled by the gnarly interplay of guitarist MJ Lenderman and pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis, allows Hartzman’s details to reveal themselves in surprising ways over the course of a single track: buried in cozy blankets of indie-rock fuzz, peering through rusty layers of noise-rock sheet metal, or burbling atop grinding alt-country that sputters like a stalled motor.

Even at their most crowd-pleasing, these modes always complement the stark realism and gothic humor in Hartzman’s words. “Chosen to Deserve” is, in theory, a love song. Centered on an undeniable Southern rock riff that would sound at home on FM radio between, say, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bob Seger, Hartzman winds through verses that pledge her devotion through a series of confessions about her messier, scrappier teen years: an ode to reaching the giddy point in a relationship when it’s impossible to overshare. “If you’re lookin’ for me/I’m in the back of an SUV,” she sings, “Doin’ it in some cul-de-sac/Underneath a dogwood tree.” 

The real way Hartzman shows her love, however, is by refusing to cover up the ugly parts. In the second verse, she sings about a friend who nearly overdosed and the doctor who told him he was “lucky to survive.” But listen to the way she sings that last word, her voice dipping and cracking and falling out of key. Filtered through the perspective of a kid who doesn’t see life as some rare gift to cherish, she makes “survival” sound a little pathetic, kinda humiliating—not something to celebrate, just another slog to get through.

If this seems like challenging material—and indeed, Wednesday are likely the first rock band to rhyme “sedan” with “Narcan”—then the approachable, communal feel of Rat Saw God is a breakthrough. The music seems designed to draw people in, aided in part by producer Alex Farrar, who’s worked on similarly commanding records from Indigo De Souza, Angel Olsen, and Snail Mail. These introspective outsider anthems could very well be the songs that bring Wednesday to their biggest stages, and they navigate this transition with newfound melodic pull—it only takes five seconds before “Quarry” lodges in your head—and increased confidence as storytellers. Like the characters she sings about, Hartzman might seem at first like she’s rambling, narrating the view as she circles the block, before you realize she’s actually baring her soul.

So much of this magic can be heard in her delivery of the words “finish him” at the end of “Bull Believer.” First, there’s the lyrical context: She’s at a New Year’s party; she has a nosebleed; someone is on the couch playing Mortal Kombat. Then there’s the way she sings it as her band thrashes and swells: first a murmur, then a wail, then a cry, then a shredded, unintelligible shriek. It goes on for a long time, and it’s difficult to imagine her replicating it every night on tour. Hartzman has explained in interviews she didn’t rehearse this moment, and she considered driving to the middle of nowhere to try it out, alone, in a wide open space. Still, the recorded version—a first take in the studio while her bandmates were downstairs playing video games—is the one. By now she’s learned there’s plenty of escape to be found in the wild, uncharted country within.

Wednesday: Rat Saw God

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