The invigorating charm of a Wednesday song is not made in vain. Frontwoman Karly Hartzman is a curator of her surroundings. Even the corner of her room that framed her half of our Zoom call was filled to the brim with an eclectic collection of records, books, and posters.

She dons Stewie Griffin pajama pants with a panache that feels unique to her alone. In the time that she used to spend on social media, Hartzman now chronicles and commemorates her life via her website prisondivorcebombshell.com. That detail-oriented curation translates directly to her songwriting, with each song telling its story through careful observation of life's beauties and shortcomings.

I sat down with the 28 year old singer-songwriter back in July to discuss the band's then-upcoming record Bleeds, which has already found itself to be one of the year's most celebrated records less than two weeks since its late September release.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Leah @ TND: First, I kind of just wanted to start with some things that I noticed from your blog. The one that you wrote for this month, you talked about Rap World. I honestly think there are good parallels between Rap World and your music, with contrasting the antiquated aspects [of life] that come with being in rural areas with the universal markers of modernity even though Rap World is set in 2009. I also just want to hear your thoughts on that movie, if you could call it that. I've seen it like five times.

Karly Hartzman: Yeah. Gosh, I have only watched it once by myself. I want to have a watch party with all of my bro friends, my friends from high school. I was just talking to someone recently and I was like, I feel like the more I'm talking to people about their high school years, the more I'm realizing that anyone that was friends with just kind of a group of dudes in that time, they had like a phase where they were all obsessed with freestyle rapping. And that was their life. And you just had to sit – if you weren't into that, you'd just sit and watch and smoke weed.

I feel like that's actually a more universal experience than I realized. That's like a coming of age thing for white boys, especially at that time. And now they're actually SoundCloud rappers at that age already. They're already on the internet. But at that time, they're just fucking around for hours, doing that kind of thing. So I think [Rap World] captures that energy really, really well. Even though the characters are adults, it captures the middle school masculinity performance that is white boys rapping or trying to embody that persona. It's just so macho but also it's a way to express that you're interested in music and the arts.

In the last like decade or so, the culture has switched from everyone having the one band that formed in their high school, and now it's just like, "oh, who was the SoundCloud rapper at your high school?" 

The kids that are like a little younger than me that I'm talking to about that are saying that kind of thing. For sure. 

Yeah, mine had two. Especially after starting college, I realized everyone has their own, like, "this was my school's guy." They all kind of sound the same. It's really funny and they're usually white also. 

Yeah. 

You also teased on the blog that "Pick Up That Knife" is the next single. That one's my favorite off the record. I think it's sonically so cool. You do so much in the runtime that's there. I wanted to ask what happened at that Death Grips show. 

Oh, I mean, literally kind of just what I described. It was Primavera 2023, I think, or 24, whatever one Death Grips played. I know Kendrick was headlining. We were touring just all the fucking time and I was so tired. It was really hard for me to go to any of the sets, but the boys would go. I think they were into ketamine at the time or something. Xandy [Chelmis] is just one of those friends that just throws up. They're just the person that does that. He is that guy and on that particular night, our steel player Xandy went to see Death Grips. We were exhausted and doing drugs and he threw up in there. And I wasn't there, but I heard the story, and I was like, "that's going on my list of things that I need to put in a song somewhere for sure." And luckily it made it in there.

It's like the Death Grips piss happened in Philly.

Oh, I don't know that.

Yeah, there was like a whole thing on Reddit about someone that pissed in the pit of the Philly show and my boyfriend was there. He stepped in the piss. So I have a secondhand account of that. 

Yeah, luckily the festival is outside. I don't know if that was outside, but. 

I kind of see this record as a celebration of Wednesday as it's existed up to this point. What was the process of curating this tracklist like? Where do you find yourself writing these songs, especially with how extensive your touring schedule has been over the last couple of years? 

Honestly, I don't even know when I wrote them because we had such a chaotic couple of years. It was definitely just in any downtime we had. I feel like touring is the way I make money, but writing and writing the songs is my therapy and my flow state thing. So it's relaxing to write the songs. I mean, most of the songs I wrote in the years in between Rat Saw God and now are on this album. We didn't have a lot of stuff that I wrote that didn't make it onto the album. I kind of just start writing as soon as an album is done and whatever's ready by the time we have a recording session booked is the album. I don't know if I'll keep doing it that way, but that's how it's been the past couple albums, including this one. 

Did you record this one at Drop of Sun? 

With Alex [Farrar]. Yeah, like everything since Twin Plagues, other than the covers album. He's our dude. 

Is a lot of the Asheville music community kind of centered around that studio? Because I know that's the main one where everyone kind of ends up recording. 

Honestly, North Carolina in general, a lot of people kind of that are in our scene go to that studio. There's some interns there that record the college bands and the younger people who just want experience and that's a good outlet for those bands. Alex was just starting out when we were recording with him at first and now he's The Dude, he's kind of a go-to guy. But, I think if you don't have access to a budget that he might need to record, there's like other people that are down to work with DIY musicians there. It's a really nice place for curating the local scene. There's also a lot of other DIY recording spaces there too – people recording each other and people in school at the UNCA using the studio there. 

You guys redid "Phish Pepsi", and you talked about "Townies" being kind of the spiritual successor to "Chosen to Deserve". What inspired that throughline of referring back to the past? 

When you write autobiographically, characters resurface and themes resurface because it's who you are. So it's by accident mostly, but I'm mostly like, if you're discussing your own progression in life, if you're thinking about your own life in a critical way, you start to notice your patterns and the type of people you return to. And I think it happens naturally. So it's a spiritual successor to our previous albums in the same way that myself now is a spiritual successor to myself a few years ago. It's just hand in hand. 

What made you want to redo "Phish Pepsi"? 

I just love that song, and I feel like it didn't have its moment necessarily enough for how much I liked that story on the Guttering EP. I wanted to see what a higher-fi recording would sound like. Also, we've never re-recorded any of our songs, so I was like, that'd be a fun one to try. 

And it sounds fairly different, too, from the original. Was that trying to fit it into the sound of the record, or is it like, "this is what I want this song to sound like now"? 

I wanted to make sure it was different. I wasn't sure exactly how. I knew we referenced the intro of Dolly Parton's "Getting Happy" for the beginning, and I knew I kind of wanted like a looped drum thing happening. So I don't know if you can hear the laundry machine going in the other room, but if you hear that sound, that's what that is. For all Wednesday songs kind of, it's hard for us to make a song that doesn't sound like it'll fit on a Wednesday album no matter what kind of sound we're doing. I pick very few outlines and then we manage to make it sound like something we would make just by our taste. 

I wanted to ask about the story behind "Gary's II", because I know that he's passed within the last year or so.

Yeah, a little over a year. 

Was that song written before he passed?

I think I wrote it after he had passed away, mostly as just an attempt to remember that story that he had told. But yeah, in the song, it's in the present, him telling me that story as he's standing outside. He would spend like hours every day just standing under his little covered carport next to his truck and just wait for one of us to come pull up to the house. And then you would go talk to him for however long he could keep you. But yeah, it was just one of the many heinous stories he would tell us. 

Do you think his presence in your life has inspired your songwriting beyond the songs that were specifically about stories that he's told you? 

Sure, and just that I want to capture Southern storytelling, he's kind of the ideal of it. He was there for years of Asheville and Appalachia that I didn't get to experience and the idea of being able to like capture any of that and pass it down is kind of the ideal. And then Colin [Miller], my other roommate, basically his last album is like a Gary concept album. All of that stuff is kind of referencing him. There's so much to tell with that dude, and I think we're just trying our best to memorialize it, you know? 

There is one lyric I wanted to hear more about: "Like a smack on the ass at the back of a dream." If you could just kind of go into that one in more detail, that one really struck me, but I like couldn't really surmise what specifically you meant by that? 

That's in "Wound Up Here." "Misread your name at the wake, snack from a vending machine." I think, if anything, other than just being a phonetically fun thing to say, I think I a lot of times try to capture the fugue state I go into when I'm experiencing sadness, something like a funeral or thinking about death. And like, you know how the dream physics kind of stuff where it's like anytime you use a bathroom in the dream, the door is so high and the toilet's really small. You walk into a bar and the bathroom's really fucked up and you're like, "this is how a bathroom looks in a dream," just because the physics are all wrong. That's kind of what I'm trying to capture with that line. Just like the uncanny feeling of when you realize you're in a dream, but actually, you're not in a dream, you're in a fugue state, like at a funeral. 

Yeah, honestly, the dream physics that I end up having, there are a lot of those videos that like are made as a joke of someone's coming to hand you something and then you turn around and they're back at the spot where they began and they're walking back up to you and it just keeps happening.

So freaky.

Now that you're coming up on six months without social media, what have you learned from that experience? What have you gotten out of it so far? 

Oh my gosh. I have learned that you have a lot more time and you can use that time to prioritize friendship. You have a lot more time and energy and space for your friends – for taking care of yourself. I've been like working out because I have more time, which I never probably would have done otherwise. Hanging out with friends more, going out and having real life experiences more than I had energy to do before. Sometimes I would leave a party with the idea of like going home and just getting in bed and getting on my phone. I was like, "I shouldn't be leaving the party to go to a party, in a way, online."

Also, It's easier to enjoy art if you find it not from an algorithm like movies, music, books. If you're getting it through a friend or through a blog or something, for some reason, something about that is more fulfilling than being sold something from the source. I felt like I was just being sold so many things all the time online and sometimes it would work, but I want more room for chaos. That's why I listen to the radio too. I like to let a little control go and have people suggest things to me instead. I could go on forever, but I'll leave it there. There's a lot of beautiful things that I have gotten from that. 

I know you started reading music blogs like Eli [Enis] and all of them. Do you also read the bigger publications or do you try to keep it to individuals? 

I haven't tried the bigger ones. I think the things I read the most are those Substacks.

I think you follow me, actually. 

Oh, that's sick. I keep up with the Substacks I'm into, and then Bandcamp newsletter shit and then maybe catching up with labels that I like. 

What labels are you into in particular? 

I think I'm subscribed to emails for Three Lobed and Numero Group, a lot of the reissue stuff. And then Leaving Records out of LA., and obviously like Arundel, which we used to be on. Dear Life, which Jake used to be on. Some smaller hardcore labels. And then mostly just surfing around, kind of clicking around on Wikipedia, just finding bands and then looking at their label, then looking at the other bands on the label for the curation. It could be something I've not ever even listened to, but I'll just go through the discography for stuff that I like. 

How did you find out about Daffo? Are there any other particularly young bands or artists that are exciting to you right now? 

Daffo – I was suggested a music video on YouTube for "Absence Makes the Heart Grow". And I was just like, "damn, yeah, this song rocks." I texted my manager and I was like, "Have you heard this?" And he was like, "Yeah, you have the same publicist." So I got Gabi's number and we were texting a little bit and I didn't realize how young she was because I was like, "these are great lyrics for your age, you're only gonna get better." I'm excited to just see where that goes.

And then as far as other bands, I don't really know who's young anymore because I can't tell what age people are. I feel like I still feel so young and then I meet young people and I'm like, no, I'm an ancient woman. But I've been talking to 9million. I don't think they're younger though. There's a band out of Asheville that just opened for us called Tombstone Poetry and they are really sweet and good. There's a lot of really sweetie young Asheville bands that are coming up that I'm excited about just because I still have a lot of hometown pride for those things. 

How do you allow yourself to stay involved with the Asheville scene? I think you said something on your blog about how you miss going to house shows and you can't really go anymore just because you feel weird about it. 

Yeah, I'm not going to house shows necessarily. I went to one recently, but it was in a backyard and I was by the fence. I go to the DIY venue here, that feels a little more like anyone can go. That feels more all ages than like a college house show. But yeah, mostly DIY venues or just smaller venues. I'm mostly around Greensboro now, but Asheville every once in a while.

Bleeds is out now.