Wednesday’s “Wasp”
Lately, I’ve been working on excavating my scream. I have a long history of letting anger decompose into anxiety—a natural byproduct of growing up around a parent who required eggshells—and I’ve come to see how the bones of that true emotion need to be exhumed in order to find release. Long covid has left measurable changes in my body—damaged mitochondria, brain inflammation, altered blood vessels, real biological shifts. But I also wonder about the invisible damage: how decades of disregarded anger might have primed my system for this kind of collapse.
When I heard North Carolina alt-rock band Wednesday‘s new album Bleeds, it felt like discovering a guiding light into that cavern. Here I’d been groaning and growling in a somatic effort, making relatively hushed noises to scrape away at the calcified rage and grief layered atop, because a full-blown shriek required energy I couldn’t access and a volume I’d been taught bordered on monstrous. Then, the album’s opening track “Reality TV Argument Bleeds” offered me a surprising catharsis.
The song begins quietly, almost as if it were a murmuring stream following the path of least resistance, before it finally grows sick of wending in ways it doesn’t want to and gathers force. The drums crescendo, hammering steadily until they burst, joined in that explosion by electric guitar, which attacks the central melody with howling neon sustain. Against that momentary cacophony, lead singer Karly Hartzmann bellows in the background, her voice a mere echo, before she steps forward into each verse’s quieter delivery. The catharsis I found lives in that split second when everything breaks open—when the song stops apologizing for what it needs to express.
Whatever throttled Hartzmann’s delivery on the opener fully detonates on the brief fury of “Wasp,” another track leading me closer to the sounds I wanted to make. From the very jump, her scream is a geyser bursting from beneath, not just fissures cracking the bedrock. The band matches her energy, with molten electric guitar spewing around her while the drums spark fast and thick.
The arrangement alone was enough to satisfy my craving to unfetter my body of these sludgy emotions, which gripped at my ankles like quicksand and threatened to pull me under. But the lyrics were equally potent. Rather than writing a repeating chorus, Hartzmann treats the second instance like another verse that deepens the dark imagery shrouding the song: “Canary shrieks and screams and spits/ I’m stuck down here inside the lift/ I’m sick, can’t fuck, push the paint around/ Castrated in my mental death.” Hartzmann’s language illustrated what chronic illness had already taught me: the sense of being entombed in a body whose limitations I can’t control, buried alive in an existence that grows smaller each day.
As silly as it might seem, listening to these tracks inspired a long-overdue permission: to unleash myself from civilized displays designed to make others more comfortable, and to be as feral as necessary to reach a truer core. And even when I’m not able to achieve the volume or screeching that, jackhammer-like, rips up that polite surface, I can still play these songs and feel something ossified cracking loose and crumbling away.
