Rat Saw God by Wednesday
Shoegaze country rock for the traumatized and hopeful
By Abby Vela
A turbulent listen, the North Carolina band, Wednesday, has released their latest album, “Rat Saw God.” This release is a gorgeous and painful follow-up to their 2021 album, “Twin Plagues,” playing with nostalgia and childhood trauma themes. However, “Rat Saw God” builds upon these themes and dares to comment on questions of love and loss, heartbreak, drug abuse, and pain. Although this album provides no answers, it indeed fails beautifully.
Wednesday is known to bend and transform the lines between genres. Combining sounds of country, shoegaze, and straight-up DIY, this new album leans into the weird. Their first single, “Bull Believer,” is my favorite on this album and is an eight-and-a-half-minute beast that combines Sonic Youth's overdrive with a building, repetitive cries for help. And in true Wednesday fashion, songs like “Bath County,” “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” and “Turkey Vultures” use unconventional chord progressions and fundamental changes that shock you into a trance, combined with the complex vocal melodies of Karly Hartzman, it’s near impossible to guess where each song leads you. It’s an evolved-yet-uncontrolled chaos.
One of the release's highlights for me has to be the lyricism. Each song feels like a black-and-white photo of a rust-belt town. “Quarry,” for example, offers vignettes of broken, rural life from the writer's perspective, watching their community hurt itself. It’s heartbreaking, and it’s breathtaking; there’s a palpable sense of the love, care, and pain that the lyricists feel toward their pasts.
I mean it sincerely when I say that I think this may be the best album released this year thus far, and I’m confident that this may be the best album of the year. I cannot recommend “Rat Saw God” enough.