WAMH x The Student: “Bleeds” Album Review

Death Grips mosh pits, a dead body dragged out of a creek, and a biker gang: These are a few of the scattered images that inhabit “Bleeds,” Wednesday’s latest and most fully realized album. Throughout the record, the North Carolina band continues to blend dizzying, blown-out, guitar-driven rock with pedal steel and country-twinged melodies, wowing fans of bands like Sonic Youth and Drive-By Truckers alike.

But what grounds “Bleeds” is lead singer Karly Hartzman’s idiosyncratic lyrics, which ground the band’s disparate influences. She positions the listener as a front-row viewer at a screening of her most vivid memories: moments that arrive in a pair of couplets, fleeting but razor sharp. Immediacy takes precedence over context, and across the album, these fragments drift into focus. These visions — small towns, flawed oddballs, past relationships, and feelings of loss — are all realized with a Southern-gothic sensibility: an eye for the grotesque and absurd (see album cover).

My favorite song on the album captures this all: the two-act “Pick Up That Knife,” a winding journey that ends in catharsis. “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,” Hartzman wryly sings against soft but intricate guitars. An instrumental break kicks off an extended outro, as the refrain “They’ll meet you outside” repeats under a Smashing Pumpkins-esque jet engine of warm guitar fuzz.

“Bitter Everyday” offers more surreal juxtapositions over some gritty guitars. “Grocery store sushi / You’re chopping ketamine with a motel room key.” Toward the end, Hartzman mixes comedy with tragedy, describing an amusing run-in with a Juggalo who turned out to be a murderer: “And the sweetest parts of life keep getting bitter every day.”

These varying emotional moods catch me with their unpredictability, yet everything feels contained in a crystal clear world. On “Wound Up Here,” a cacophony of guitars and soaring pedal steel accompanies Hartzman as she humorously alliterates a “Pitbull puppy pissin’ off a balcony.” Meanwhile, “Carolina Murder Suicide” strips away the noise for lush soundscape, rife with mellow keys and droning guitars, as she confront the album’s darkest subject matter: a real-life murder.

“Elderberry Wine,” “Phish Pepsi,” and “The Way Love Goes” see the band leaning harder into its country roots and would feel welcomely familiar to fans of bandmate MJ Lenderman’s “Manning Fireworks.” The latter offers the album’s most personal glimpse, with Hartzman lamenting a lost relationship and the feelings of inferiority that followed: “I oversold myself / On the night we met / I’m not as entertaining as / You might’ve thought I was then.”

The album drifts for a few brief moments. “Reality TV Argument Bleeds” sets the tone for the album but feels like an imaginative rehash of the opener from their 2023 release “Rat Saw God.” “Wasp,” the album's relentless minute-and-a-half screamo detour, is electrifying but feels out of place. The ballad “The Way Love Goes” feels less lyrically adventurous than the rest of the album.

Still, these brief moments hardly diminish how much I enjoyed “Bleeds.” Hartzman’s songwriting is sharper than ever, and the album serves as a testament to the ways memory inhabits our everyday lives. And perhaps it suggests that our most impulsive and imaginative recollections capture something quietly formative.

Personal Favorites: “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On),” “Bitter Everyday,” “Elderberry Wine,” “Pick Up That Knife.”