Six studio albums deep into their career, the band Wednesday would be forgiven for trying to reinvent themselves. That’s especially true given that their preceding full-length studio effort, the 2023 album Rat Saw God, raised their profile significantly. The time is right for a major statement piece, an assertion that they are ready to take their art to the next level. The new release Bleeds posits that a different path might be optimal. In the fundamentals, Wednesday sounds exactly like themselves on this fresh release. They impress by holding the line and yet also finding new reserves of inspiration.

Led by the songwriting of frontwoman Karly Hartzman (the songs are credited to the whole band, but it’s generally understood Hartzman is the primary architect), Wednesday pummels their way to a rough and tough emotional truth. The lyrics are often driven by stories, sometimes drawn from the collective’s own experiences (the gnarled, intense “Bitter Everyday” is inspired by an encounter with an unhoused woman in the band’s hometown of Asheville, North Carolina) and sometimes from the messed-up world around them (“Carolina Murder Suicide” is a spare, spooky ballad that came into being after Hartzman binged podcasts about the crimes committed by Alex Murdaugh in South Carolina). In that sense, “Gary’s II” feels like the spiritual heart of the album, taking a shaggy tale recounted by a seen-it-all local (“He took one look at you after he stopped to laugh/ And he noticed he mistook you got hit on behalf/ Of some bastard from the bar who had slept with his wife/ You said, ‘I never seen you in my God given life'”) and transforming it into a shuffling hoedown.

Hartzman is incredibly skillful at deploying evocative details in her lyrics. Unlike some acts that similarly sketch out elaborate scenes, such as Drive-By Truckers or the Hold Steady, Wednesday never trap themselves by shoveling in colorful context just for the sake of it. There’s always a greater purpose. On “Townies,” the lines “Went to a party in the county/ Stokin’ bonfires with leaf blowers” set a vivid scene to added potency to the song’s pointed cataloging of the indignities young woman often endure in that cultural environment of backwoods ingenuity. Songs that could become diversionary yarns instead resonate with the honesty of open-nerve memoir. Sometimes that plays out with a sprightly sense of humor. That’s the case with “Phish Pepsi,” a song first recorded for the 2021 EP Guttering that co-billed guitarist MJ Lenderman as lead, which comes across like some funked-up nineteen-seventies country-rock that received a blood transfusion from King Missile: “We watched a Phish concert and Human Centipede/ Two things I now wish I had never seen.”

Wednesday are in incredible form across the album, shaping the music as a compendium of everything that’s great about bringing guitars and drums and other instruments of glorious noise together. “Candy Breath” surfs on amazing squalls of guitar sound, and “Wasp” is a blistering punk assault. At their marrow, the band are aligned with the acts that made the soft-LOUD-soft structures into the sound of Gen-X disenchantment. “Reality TV Argument Bleeds” lives in the intersection between shoegaze and Pixies-ish alternative rock, and “Pick Up That Knife” takes shifting sonic dynamics to a whole never level, winding up with a song that restlessly reinvents itself at the speed of thought. Thrilling as the various blasts of volume are, Bleeds is equally effective when it quiets down a bit. “Elderberry Wine” has a spiritual kinship with peak Lucinda Williams, and “The Way Loves Goes” is an affecting ballad.

Sometimes a band makes a great record by dazzling with their unexpected invention. Sometimes a band makes a great record by simply making a great record. Bleeds, without a doubt, is a great record.