Earlier this year, I covered the announcement of the release of Wednesday’s Rat Saw God and boygenius’ the record in the same article. I did so because both announcements were made on the same day, and because both albums figured to be two of the biggest indie rock releases of the year, one from a trio of modern day icons, the other from a band that was slowly but surely building its reputation as one of the best young acts in the country. But after getting the chance to listen to both albums, I’ve realized that they’re linked in a different way, too. One of them feels like the genre’s recent past, stuck in a zeitgeist that’s rapidly growing stale; the other, despite borrowing from influences that reach back before its band members were born, feels like the bold, exciting future.

Let’s start with the past. As you’re likely aware, boygenius is a supergroup comprising of singer-songwriters Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker, three of the most influential and famous indie rock musicians working today, and three who are emblematic of the “sad girl” aesthetic that’s ruled the genre since at least the mid-2010s. They may chafe at that designation, but it’s true – all three made a name for themselves by writing stark, literary songs about trauma and heartbreak, spawning millions of imitators and millions more contemporaries who are probably annoyed that people think they’re imitators. I’ve described their self-titled debut EP from 2018 as “inarguably great”, and I stand by that – its six songs not only exemplified a certain type of indie rock, but perfected it. 

It’s also, I would argue, in the running for the best thing that any of its three members have ever released. While I have an immense amount of respect for each of their solo work, the very nature of Bridgers, Baker, and Dacus’ music leaves them prone to occasionally writing morose, punchless songs that feel like they work better on the page than on record. But by writing and performing songs together, they were more or less forced to come up with fuller and more powerful arrangements to accommodate three different voices and, on occasion, three different guitars. Any one of the trio would be capable of writing a song like “Souvenir,” a fairly straightforward strummer, for one of their solo albums. But such a version would lack the spectral quality of the harmonized chorus, or the haunting moment where Daucus joins and then takes over from Bridgers in the second verse. Even a song like “Me and My Dog,” which is primarily sung by Bridgers, would lack its Earth-abandoning enormity if not for the other two singers’ contributions to the coda. 

But while the three singers brought out the best of each other on the EP, on the record they slide into complacency. Rather than discovering a new level of their craft as they did on the EP, each of the three boygenius members come across as the blandest, most pop-friendly version of themselves on this latest release, their eccentricities muted and their edges sanded down. These artists have been approaching a kind of “pop era” for a few years now; the production of Dacus’ Home Video is notably slicker than her previous work, and Bridgers was featured on indie pop group MUNA’s “Silk Chiffon” in 2022. But the version of boygenius that’s presented on the record feels notably superficial – like they’ve become the kind of songwriters the internet thinks they are, instead of the much more interesting artists they actually are. 

Part of this problem is musical. While boygenius sing together frequently on the record, it isn’t with the same dynamism that they possessed on the EP – the harmonies are simpler, their voices don’t interact so much as appear simultaneously, and the instrumentals themselves are, for the most part, built around simple, mid-90s rock templates. Sometimes this works – “Not Strong Enough” is a great hurtling-down-the-highway song that, in a more just world, would be getting major pop and mainstream rock radio play – but frequently it turns into something like “Satanist,” which merely sanitizes the riff from The Toadies’ “Possum Kingdom,” or “Revolution 0”. “Satanist”is the kind of wispy, inert, hookless track boygenius’ detractors will accuse them of exclusively making, and the production itself is about as generic as it comes, abandoning the earthy, ghostly atmosphere of the EP for something much shinier but more hollow.

But perhaps the most frustrating part of the record is its substandard songwriting. The focus of each of these artists’ careers has always been their lyrics, which offered not only a look into their deepest darkest thoughts but also helped establish distinct personalities, the latter of which is probably just as important to their success as their musical prowess. But the deft storytelling and piercing imagery that’s defined all of their work is replaced on the record with lines that feel designed to be turned into tweets and memes. “You say you’re a winter bitch/But summer’s in your blood,” delivered by Dacus on “True Blue,” is a dreadfully banal couplet for the lyricist who wrote songs like “Night Shift” and “Yours & Mine,” as is the inclusion of the ubiquitous to Twitter-favorite phrase “Fuck around and find out.” Dacus, my favorite member of boygenius, serves up another clunker on the treacly “We’re in Love,” while Bridgers’ “Letter to an Old Poet” coasts entirely on reusing the coda-melody from “Me and My Dog.” Even the pot shot the group takes at Leoanrd Cohen on, you guessed it, “Leonard Cohen” was so bad that Vulture devoted part of an entire article about it. 

For so long, the members of boygenius have felt like the template that contemporary singer-songwriters have built themselves off of. But the record, generic name and all, feels like merely a template, an attempt to write a boygenius-like record rather than a genuine product of the group. Bridgers’ morbidity, Dacus’ existentialism, Baker’s rage cloaking eloquence – all of it is muted and reduced to its least interesting parts. the record isn’t a bad album, but it is a thoroughly mediocre one, and that’s in large because it feels like it could have been made by anyone pretending to be boygenius, rather than just boygenius themselves. It coasts on the appealing personalities that they expressed through interviews and social media and, up until the record, their music as well, without offering any new musical ideas. boygenius’ talents haven’t disappeared, but creatively, it’s clear that, at least as a trio, they’ve hit a wall, and it makes one wonder if the intimate, confessional brand of indie rock that they popularized is on its way out from the forefront, receding in favor of something new and fresh.

If that is indeed the case, I have a feeling that the new and the fresh will sound something like Wednesday. A grungy four-piece from Asheville, North Carolina, Wednesday’s reputation among critics and indie fans has grown slowly but surely. Releasing debut and sophomore albums I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone and Twin Plagues in 2020 and 2021, respectively, limited their touring options, and almost forced listeners to discover their work at their own pace. 2022 would prove to be a fertile year for their online reputation, however, with the release of covers EP Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ‘em Up, single “Bull Believer” (my choice for song of the year) and the sophomore solo album from guitarist Jake “MJ” Lenderman, Boat Songs, all of which received heaps of praise and whetted the public’s appetite for a full length release, which they received in April in the form of Rat Saw God. 

Broadly speaking, Rat Saw God is not a radical departure from Wednesday’s older records, which also sound like somebody took the trailer trash Southern rock of Drive-By Truckers and the textured, noisy riffs of Smashing Pumpkins and burned them together in the same oil drum off the side of an Appalachian highway. But it stands out in its decisiveness and self-assurance. It goes for the throat early with “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” whose title alone is evocative enough to set the scene that the rest of the album will take place in, and whose convulsing guitars calibrate the listener’s ears for the rest of the album’s grimy texture. Wednesday keeps up the momentum by rushing feet first into “Bull Believer,” an epic meltdown of a track that ends with lead singer Karly Hartzman shrieking for nearly ninety seconds straight, after which twenty-seven more minutes of parking lot overdoses, gun busts, and the occasionally sweet song about watching Formula One await. 

Despite Lenderman’s burgeoning indie fame as a kind of zillenial-guitar hero, Hartzman is the unquestioned focus of Wednesday, her cracked voice delivering the kind of vivid, evocative, and lived in lyrics that boygenius failed to conjure up on the record. It’s not just that Hartzman’s lyrics make me feel like I’m sitting right next to her in a dirty kiddie pool drinking piss-colored Fanta; it’s that it’s clear that these stories and images mean a lot to her, specifically, and feel like they only could come from her. While listening to Rat Saw God, I couldn’t help but think of Vince Mancini’s review of Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s coming-of-age film that also engages in a kind of hyper-regionality, swapping out Sacramento in place of Asheville. “I only really care that [a film] feels like something the filmmaker had to tell me, and that it was that filmmaker that had to tell me,” he writes, before going on to say “It’s only because [Lady Bird] is so specific to [Gerwig] that it can be meaningful to other people.” 

When Hartzman writes about breaking into a neighborhood pool at night to drink or having bad sex in an SUV, she’s keying into the same kind of specificity that Mancini wrote about, and deriving the same kind of meaning from it as well. And when she does so over the backdrop of Lenderman’s squelching guitars and Xandy Chelmis’ squealing pedal-steel, it sounds like she’s doing so because this is the only way she can possible impart the meaning and intensity of her songs.
The goal is not to sound “relatable” or “universal,” at least not directly, but for us to know Hartzman and her world through her words and through Wednesday’s counterintuitively alienating instrumentation. It’s something that the members of boygenius used to be capable of doing; Lucy Dacus did it when she sang about her Christian upbringing, Phoebe Bridgers when she sang about her abusive relationship with Ryan Adams, and it’s something that I have faith they’ll be able to do in the future. But at the moment it sounds like they’re pandering a little too much to their audience. If the record’s 90 Metacritic score is any indication, it works for a lot of people. But it isn’t working for me. I want to be a little put off, to look into a world I don’t know in a way only you can show me. That’s something Wednesday offers, and something I suspect the most important and exciting acts of the next decade will offer as well.