Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman on Writing Through Pain: “If You Can Describe The Feeling, Then You’re Seeing It From A Distance”

On the opening day of Coachella, singer-guitarist Karly Hartzman of Wednesday briefly looked puzzled backstage as some pleasant but unfamiliar pop drifted over from the nearby mainstage.

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“It sounds like Christian rock right now,” she says, tilting her head with a smile.

It wasn’t, but the confusion was maybe understandable amid the noise and desert heat. This was Hartzman’s first trip to the world-famous Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, and what she previously knew of it was only what she’d noticed from a distance over the years. Sitting in a folding chair outside her band’s trailer, she was still dressed as she was onstage an hour before: a trucker hat with sunglasses perched on top, and a black strappy top that revealed the busy line tattoos scattered along her arms. 

“All my friends that grew up coming to this festival were really stoked,” she says. “I was like, I don’t know the culture, I don’t know who usually plays it. But I know everyone’s really excited on our behalf.”

During their opening weekend’s set, someone in the crowd fainted. Both Friday shows inside the Sonora tent were packed, as the band ripped through songs of vivid storytelling and memory, drawing on her own life experiences and others around her North Carolina community. The words are set to a distinctive blend of hard-edged indie rock with Xandy Chelmis’ twangy pedal steel lines and other smoldering textures from the South.

“It’s pretty representative of all the things we listen to, mixed with where we’re from,” Hartzman says of their sound. “I feel like we’re into ’90s indie rock and shoegaze, but country music influence is unavoidable in North Carolina. It seeps in if you let it, and we wanted it to because we love it. It came really naturally.”

Since last year’s release of the band’s sixth studio album, Bleeds, “We’ve been touring our asses off,” she says, and there are many more dates ahead across 2026. In May, the band heads to New Zealand and Australia, then returns to the U.S. for several summer music festivals, starting with Bonnaroo in Manchester, Tennessee, on June 12.

The album has won wide acclaim for its collection of songs about love and death, horror and innocence, in words vulnerable, empathetic, but also blunt and unsparing. The sounds stretch seamlessly from hardcore to bluegrass, and includes what is currently Wednesday’s most popular track, “Elderberry Wine.” The song is an indie hit, with nearly 9 million streams on Spotify alone. 

The love song sets modern lyrics against a countrified sound: “Sweet song is a long con / I drove you to the airport with the e-brake on / Ain’t heard that voice in a long time / Had to check back there to make sure you were alive.”

“Elderberry Wine” also showcases the understated side of her vocal range, which leaps from the gentle to enraged. “‘Elderberry Wine’ is the hardest song to sing in our set for me, because it takes control and I’m also thinking like, ‘Am I boring everyone when I’m singing that?” she says with a smile. “Whereas, I feel like I’m performing at the most I can give when I’m doing a screaming song, that’s more demanding on my voice, my vocal chords, my physical self. But expecting patience from people during our softer songs is actually harder for me, but people love them.”

Wednesday branches out further with the album’s playful “Phish Pepsi,” set to some authentic jammy organic noodling in the Phish/Grateful Dead tradition. Hartzman’s lyrics begin with the story of a night of middle school partying and ends with a weirder grown-up memory: “We watched a Phish concert and Human Centipede / Two things I now wish I had never seen / We smoked weed out of a Pepsi can / Lyin’ around under a Christmas tree.”

“Jam bands are a blind spot for me, to be honest,” the singer explains. “That song is about one very specific memory of my friend attending a Phish concert. But when I was dating Jake Lenderman [aka MJ], he’s really into Dead and his family is, so I got it by being on the outskirts of watching him and his dad enjoy it—not a phase I specifically had. But I do know that the lead singer of Phish, Trey Anastasio, has heard that song and is not offended by it. He seems like a cool guy.”

She already knows how she wants the next Wednesday album to play out: Loud. 

Hartzman predicts a “a fully screaming hardcore album. I had a very interesting year of dating this past year, and I desperately need to channel some of my frustration with that into something.”

She adds with a laugh, “I had an idea that I wanted it all to be from the perspective of horror movie protagonists. But now I’m like, last year felt like a horror movie to me. So it might be personal again.”

Hartzman has been studying hardcore, reading up on its history, embracing it as her own. An early sign of that direction is the new album’s thrashing “Wasp,” which reacts to the deterioration of a relationship through not-quite 90 seconds of aggressive guitar and non-stop rage vocals.

“Mostly, it was a challenge for myself to see if I could scream an entire song,” she says of the track. “I try to have at least one thing I’ve never done on every album. I think that’s where we’re headed, and I’ve been putting a lot more time into listening to bands that are in that direction further than what I’ve heard already. Listeners can tell when you’re referencing something but you’re not devoted to it. I want to make sure I’m fully devoted with an appreciation for hardcore music before I bother diving into it.”

A lot of artists with a popular new song, as Wednesday has in “Elderberry Wine,” might steer its next project in a similar direction. Hartzman has other ideas.

“We have a lot of songs that sound like ‘Elderberry Wine.’ If they like that song, there’s plenty of other ones to hear from us,” she insists. “It’s not like it’s an outlier in our discography. I would never make music with the audience in mind, or let that influence what I’m going to write. That’s a fast track to making a shitty album.”

She adds, “I get it, because having someone’s attention is so addictive, I guess. That’s not what motivates me.”

As a songwriter and recording artist, Hartzman first felt like she fully reached the sound and content she’d always imagined with “Bull Believer,” an epic of noisy, contemplative rock on the 2023 breakthrough album Rat Saw God. The intensely emotional lyrics were inspired by teenage memories of a friend dying from an overdose, and closes after nearly nine minutes with the singer roaring into a microphone.

“I had been like, okay, my purpose on this earth is to write about this really painful experience that I had when I was younger,” Hartzman recalls. “Whenever I feel like I write a song that can accurately express that for me, I’ll have done what I wanted as a musician. Luckily, I did that on the last album, and now I’m trying to do that with other things in my life.”

Before she began making music, Hartzman had always written for herself, whether it was poetry or creating zines to share. “Once I picked up guitar in college, I was like, ‘Oh, these were songs,’” she explains. “They were always supposed to be songs and fell into place. But I’d always wanted to be a musician. I just didn’t have access to the things I needed to get there before I was at college.” 

Midway through the writing of Bleeds, her longtime romantic relationship with lead guitarist MJ Lenderman ended while on tour in Tokyo. The album was recorded a month after the breakup, and their creative partnership continues. While Lenderman left Wednesday’s touring unit to focus on his solo career, he’s fully expected to return for the band’s next studio recordings. 

“Personally, we’re just kind of good,” Hartzman says. “We’re buddies, so there’s no personal problem.”

The band, which also includes drummer Alan Miller and bassist Ethan Baechtold, is joined on the road by touring guitarist Jake “Spyder” Pugh.

As a source of inspiration and catharsis, writing about her own experiences has never been a problem for the singer-lyricist. “I don’t see the point otherwise,” Hartzman says. “I’ve found it to be the most rewarding for me, so I’m like, why would I not write about it? The thought of it being personal never limited my willingness to put something out. It’s motivating.” 

She takes comfort in the sharing, she says. “To have written the song, I would’ve had to overcome it. If you can describe the feeling, then you’re seeing it from a distance, you know?”

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On the opening day of Coachella, singer-guitarist Karly Hartzman of Wednesday briefly looked puzzled backstage as some pleasant but unfamiliar pop drifted over from the nearby mainstage. “It sounds like Christian rock right now,” she says, tilting her head with a smile. It wasn’t, but the confusion was maybe understandable amid the noise and desert […]Steve Appleford{authorlink}https://www.spinmagazine.com/feed/SPINMusic News, Album Reviews, Concert Photos, Videos and Morehttps://static.spinmagazine.com/files/2023/08/cropped-logo-spin-s-340×340.png