When Asheville, North Carolina swamp-rockers Wednesday released their last album Rat Saw God in early 2023, you’d doubt that they would soon find themselves as one of the leading groups in a rising movement of young, Southern singer-songwriters reclaiming the disaffected Americana of their youth, inking tattered portraits of one-light towns and the lovably loopy characters within them. Bleeds isn’t exactly their most cohesive album to date, which is exactly why it feels like their truest. The knots within their deadpan rambles and dusty musings find the group at their fleshiest, desperately searching for some semblance of meaning in the cobwebbed corners of our troubled existences.

Bleeds, the band’s fourth studio album, has seemingly been in the works for a long time. It was recorded before guitarist MJ Lenderman released last year’s solo breakout Manning Fireworks, and before Lenderman and frontwoman Karly Hartzman would publicly announce their split. Lenderman still records with the group but no longer tours with them, marking the beginnings of something of an uncertain new era for the band. The surrounding turbulence ends up grounding the album in a strange way — it’s still a rollicking, raucous Wednesday album, and a pretty damn great one at that.

The best Wednesday songs are deceptively sweet, charming portraits of a sickly underbelly of honeyed Southern comfort. Bleeds is teeming with those songs — the seedy protagonist of “Townies” gets killed off before the second chorus, but it’s hard to spend too much time mourning him when the riffs are this immediately hard and fast. Singles “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)” and “Bitter Everyday” are sticky to their core, but buried underneath layers upon layers of noisy, slaphappy grunge-country. The music video for the latter takes place during a boozy girls-only pontoon party, but ends with Hartzman solemnly overlooking the moonlit lake as the track is stripped to acoustics — it feels like the most naked moment in an album of hysteric folklore.

When Hartzman starts a song, she often begins with a semi-absurd line that perks up your ears, warm-up exercises in her junk-drawer approach to storytelling. There’s a broken nose piercing, a tooth cracked on a cough drop, a razorblade on a water slide, a pair of legs stuck to a leather chair. Her nutty, folksy stories rarely cast her as an active participant — she heard them from one of the local crazies, or maybe watched them transpire from afar. She’s an observer by trade, sometimes an oral historian, recounting hearty tales with morals completely unbeknownst to anyone involved. Wednesday songs are entirely unromantic in their portrayals of home, but they retain a sense of longing for the uncomplicated nature of pure trashiness — no one has written more passionately about grocery store sushi.

Bleeds sees the group at both their loudest and quietest, their most dynamic set of songs to date. Lead single “Elderberry Wine” is one of their treacliest yet, and “The Way Love Goes” and “Carolina Murder Suicide” play like intimate home ruminations over the snarling hiss of a tape recorder. “Pick Up That Knife” traverses twinkly guitar noodlings into waves of crunchy distortion, its last seconds of feedback dripping into “Wasp”, a bellowing post-hardcore screamer that rivals Rat Saw God’s “Bull Believer” as their most irate track.

Even though Bleeds will be their biggest look yet, it remains firmly rooted in the earth that planted it. “Phish Pepsi” is a rootsier re-working of a lo-fi fan favorite from an early EP, while closer “Gary’s II” is a continuation of a saga chronicling memories with the band’s late landlord. Maybe Bleeds is something of a lineage, a shiny new notch in a rusty belt loop. No matter how wide its reach may become, you can’t pick it up without getting a little dirt under your fingernails. The album’s title is only muttered once throughout its entire runtime, with Hartzman bemoaning as a “reality TV argument bleeds / through the floor when I go to sleep”. Bleeds is an album of being kept awake by the trivial, a collage of bleary-eyed snapshots of the humorously mundane and our attempts to wrestle with their unsightliness. The Carolinas finally have their own comedy of errors.

Pre-order Bleeds by Wednesday HERE