The lead up to the new album from Asheville, North Carolina–bred band Wednesday has been like watching an artist assemble a formidable arsenal. The first single, “Elderberry Wine,” is rich, warm, and insinuating. The band’s next offering, “Wound Up Her (By Holdin On),” is swampy and prickly, recalling Waxahatchee around the time the grungier plaster started falling away to reveal a twangier, more homespun palette underneath. Taken together, the songs offer the band heard from different angles.

Now, Wednesday is out with “Pick Up That Knife,” a cut that is familiar yet sharply different. The difference are so pronounced in fact, that the song sometimes seems at odds with itself. It’s in a perpetual state of reinvention, somewhat adhering to the soft-LOUD-soft model popularized by Pixies and Nirvana but also making more dramatic shifts in tone and tempo. Karly Hartzman delivers characteristically inventive, evocative lyrics (“Cracked my tooth on a cough drop/ Winter stuck around after it’s gone/ Grocery store on Christmas/ Parked too close to someone to get out”) with vocals that build in emotional intensity until she’s repeating the line “They’ll meet you outside” as a primal howl. It’s a stunner.

Bleeds, the new album from Wednesday, is scheduled for release in September.