Despite what the Grammys and Twitter stan armies would have you believe, music is not a competition. Sure, it’s competitive in the sense that every industry is competitive, but there are no win/loss records, no championship titles, and no playoffs. 

But sometimes you go to a show and it feels like the band has won something – like they’ve finally scaled some kind of mountain top, like they’ve achieved the closest thing an artist can to total victory. Sometimes that’s made clear when an artist has sold out a multi-thousand seat arena, or had a string of successful singles or albums. But with the kinds of artists I find myself most interested in, it’s not always as clear cut. Usually it follows a critical or commercial breakthrough, sure, but it’s also more than that – it’s a band finding the sweet spot in their setlist, their performance, and their connection with fans. A sense that they’ve finally “arrived” and reached something approaching their prime. A sense that, in some immeasurable way, they’ve made an impact.

That’s the best way I can describe what it was like to see Wednesday perform at the Music Hall of Williamsburg last Tuesday. I’ve written a lot about Wednesday on this site recently, and going into the show, I wasn’t sure if it made sense to do so once again. But a few songs in, it became clear to me that this wasn’t just any other show – it was a moment I had to write about and record, the kind of show I haven’t seen since before the pandemic. It felt like a watershed moment for both the band and indie rock in general, or at least as close as one could get to a watershed moment in today’s media environment. It felt like a night that Wednesday won.

The reason this winning feels important to me is that the kind of band Wednesday is – loud, heavy, and not located in New York, Los Angeles, or Philadelphia – has not exactly been fashionable over the past half-decade or so. Folk and country influenced singer-songwriters like the boygenius trio (who I’ve also written a lot about) and Angel Olsen (another favorite of mine) have become the face of indie music, with established, festival level acts like Tame Impala and Vampire Weekend releasing the occasional attention-grabbing album that also puts them back on the map. But for whatever reason, Wednesday – a country and shoegaze inspired band from Asheville, North Carolina that prominently features steel guitars – has caught on. They’ve been the subject of profiles or features in Pitchfork, The Ringer, Stereogum, Nylon, and even Variety, cultivating a slow rise to fame that began with the release of their 2021 album Twin Plagues, followed by their 2022 covers EP Mowin’ the Leaves Instead of Pilin’ Em Up, and – finally – 2023’s long anticipated Rat Saw God. 

My surprise at the coverage they received isn’t reflective of the quality of their music, which I’ve been very effusive of in the past, but rather the way that the music industry – even the indie portion of it – has moved around from valuing cohesive bands in favor of charismatic solo artists. Lead singer and guitarist Karly Hartzman is the focus of Wednesday, sure, but anyone who’s listened to the band knows they wouldn’t be the same without the feedback soaked fretwork of Jake “MJ” Lenderman, the ear-splitting steel guitar of Xandy Chambliss, or – as their live show makes apparent – the thunderous drumming of Alan Miller (the bass playing, performed by Margo Schultz on Rat Saw God and played by Ethan Baechtold on tour, is also very good). When Rostam Batmanglij left Vampire Weekend, it didn’t create a furor, because the band had kind of transformed into an Ezra Koenig solo project at that point, and boygenius is only boygenius because each of its three members launched well-regarded solo careers before the band’s formation. The members of Wednesday, on the other hand, feel inextricable from one another. It may be Hartzman’s voice and words we hear the most, but, instrumentally, it’s clear that the band’s sound isn’t her vision alone.

It’s also notable to me that they look like a band, and specifically a band from the South. Lots of indie rock bands strategically dress down, but when I saw them last week, they looked like a band that had more or less lived out of a van for the past eight weeks. All of the male band members wear their hair long and shaggy, with Miller’s cut into a mullet, a hairdo whose bro-ey history was immediately undercut by the drummer’s glasses and the “What’s More Punk Than the Library?” T-shirt he was wearing. Lenderman, who wrote so wittily about Southern sports culture on his 2022 solo album Boat Songs, was sporting a shirt with a grinning Dale Earnhardt portrait, while Hartzman wore a Tim McGraw shirt, another extremely Southern signifier muddled up by her trademark black lipstick. Between songs, Hartzman and Chambliss took swigs from a shared jug of liquor, the contents of which I couldn’t make out, but could’ve been homemade moonshine for all I know.

The whole scene was enough to make me wonder if, as one of the few contemporary big name indie bands from the South, Wednesday felt a misplaced responsibility to perform Southerness for the Brooklyn crowd – thoughts that immediately evaporated once the band tore into their first song, “Hot Rotten Grass Smell.” 

The remarkable thing about the Wednesday live experience is how little is lost in the transfer of their songs from the record to the stage, despite all of the gnarled and unwieldy elements they contain. The band’s guitars lost none of their heft or volume, the rhythms none of their tempo or composure. Hartzman’s vocals, which stretch syllables beyond practical lengths, also carried over live, which is never a given for groups that rely on unconventional singers. I’ve seen indie bands do well in small venues, and then fail to project themselves to a bigger room (Snail Mail stands out as the most obvious example), but Wednesday had no such problem – maybe it’s a result of their already loud music, but the band never seemed overwhelmed by the crowd or the size of the room. They handled it like old pros, and got good results.

In fact, they actually seemed more comfortable and in sync than the first time I saw them at the much smaller Baby’s All Right venue at the end of 2021. There, they put on a good show, but the flow of their setlist was herky-jerky, with too many pauses in between each song, which was only exacerbated by the loud-quiet-loud structure of most of their songs, the end result being an audience who couldn’t decided if they wanted to mosh or cooly hang back. But on Tuesday, the band seemed much more in control – there were still some gaps between songs, but they were filled in with more refined banter, commentary, and bits (which included reading fortunes that Tenci, the opening band, wrote for each member of Wednesday) that helped fill up the dead air. They let loose a little bit musically, too – Lenderman added a quick, choogling guitar solo to the country-influenced “Chosen to Deserve,” and Hartzman accentuated some of her key lyrics with throat shredding screams. The set itself primarily pulled from Rat Saw God but featured plenty of highlights from Twin Plagues like “Handsome Man” and “Gary’s,” and even included a country section with “Chosen to Deserve” and the band’s cover of Gary Stewart’s “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Double).” I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone, the band’s pre-Lenderman 2020 album, also got some shine via energetic performances of “Billboard,” “Maura,” and “Fate Is…”

But perhaps the most impressive aspect of Wednesday’s performance was the way they commanded the crowd and the way the crowd played off of them. Hartzman commented that she had never seen a crowd sing along to so many of her songs – which surprises me, if only because she’s written so many lines that sound great sung by a crowd (the highlight, at least for me, was “I can walk on water”/”I can raise the dead” from the opening of “Bath County”) that lend themselves to the kind of funny, provocative sloganeering most bands can only dream of. I’ve written in the past about how overactive crowds can ruin a concert experience, but aside from some overactive participant outliers at this concert, the fans helped to enhance the experience. Someone began blowing bubbles during “She’s Actin’ Single” (“My heart is breaking”/”Like the tiny bubbles”) and the band was so energized that they added two extra songs to the setlist – a haunting rendition of “Feast of Snakes,” which Hartzman performed solo, and “Turkey Vultures,” which inspired a slow building circle pit that collapsed in on itself as the song’s tempo picked up. “I had no idea what was going to happen, since there isn’t a real drop in that song until the end,” Hartzman said. “But it looks like you all made the right choice.”

Shortly before performing “Bull Believer,” the eight and a half minute Rat Saw God centerpiece and that ended the show, Hartzman gave a quick speech about how, while proud of their Southern identity, the band had struggled to reconcile their pride with the realities of Southern culture, particularly the wave of anti-trans and anti-abortion legislation that has swept the region over the past year. She offered the last song, and the desperate screams that make up its back half, to those currently having their rights curtailed by those laws, and encouraged the crowd to do the same. They obliged (and even added their own spin via a crowdsurfer), and Hartzman’s increasingly frantic call to “finish him,” which I used to think of as merely a Mortal Kombat reference, took on a new meaning cast against the backdrop of transgender and abortion rights rollbacks set into law by predominantly male politicians. The controlled chaos of the band as a whole felt like a generational purge of exasperation, and the strobe lighting that framed the shrieking Hartzman was a very 90s depiction of youth frustration. But there was no nihilism or irony here – just the very real feeling that outside, something was not right, but that inside, Wednesday could channel that unease into something worthwhile

As I was leaving the venue, I felt the urge to tweet out a bold, almost hyperbolic statement about the show, but I stopped myself. I wasn’t old enough to make the comparison I wanted to make, and I knew that, from a sheer sales perspective, Wednesday is unlikely to live up to what I wanted to say. But watching a heavy band from rural America whip a young crowd into a frenzy, channeling all of their rage intro frustration into music that was both ugly and pretty, mining America’s rich folk past while sketching out unambiguously progressive politics – I could really only compare it to one other thing. Apparently, I was not alone.

“So,” a woman in her late 30s or early 40s asked her date as they followed me out, “they’re kind of like Nirvana, huh?”