Asheville, band Wednesday are releasing a deluxe version of their 2025 LP Bleeds to coincide with the album’s one-year anniversary. Out this Friday, September 18th, from Dead Oceans, the 20-track expanded edition includes a couple of previously unheard songs in demo form, as well as remixes from the original record. Among those, Avey Tare will rework “Carolina M urder Suicide”; Fire-Toolz will give her take on “Bitter Everyday”; and DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ will do who-knows-what to “Elderberry Wine.”
Wednesday’s Bleeds saw the North Carolina group pulled tightly between the two poles that have defined their musical output for the better half of the 2020s—on one end, slow-talking and sweet-as-honey country; on the other, relentlessly thrashing doom and shoegaze. The lead single from “Bleeds’ collection of B-sides, titled “June 2,” falls into the former camp, getting most of its looks from “Elderberry Wine’s” side of the family (as opposed to, say, “Wasp’s“) while still getting a hard-earned cacophony of screams and sludge midway through. Still, Karly Hartzman’s warts-and-all lyricism maintains the signature Wednesday ugly-prettiness.
check out the full tracklist and listen to “June 2 (Early Version),” a new track produced by Kenneth Blume.
Sunsets and confetti colour the backdrop of her portraits of frozen burritos and snot crusted to someone’s sleeve, and both are rendered hypothetical at the final verse when the body gets revealed, swinging from the ceiling of a storage unit. All of it runs through the filter of Hartzman’s characteristically matter-of-fact delivery, an obituary told in omniscient second-person, strung along on Xandy Chelmis’ slide guitar until, without warning, the cord gets cut.
Earlier this summer, Karly Hartzman duetted with Rivers Cuomo on “We Might as Well Be Strangers,” the Blume-produced lead single from Weezer’s new Gold Album. It was surprisingly good! Wednesday and Mannequin Pussy will kick off their joint Bitch Cabal Tour in late October.
