The New Southern Gothic Rock
From the mountains of Appalachia, the swamps of Florida, and the Pine Belt of Mississippi, a 21st century brand of Southern rock ’n’ roll has risen. And Carolina’s Wednesday are the ringleaders.
In the parking lot of an abandoned K-Mart that she’s made her playground and her arena in equal measure, Karly Hartzman cheeses at the camera, singing cryptic lyrics about snow globes, family portraits, kids with buzzcuts, and coming home to her “secondhand handsome man.”
Her bandmates dance around her in slow motion, sipping CookOut milkshakes or fluorescent blue Gatorade. Their Ring Pop-adorned fingers pluck at their instruments and flip off the camera as rays of sunlight glint off the spit-slicked candy gems.
Watching the “Handsome Man” music video during the summer of 2021 was my first encounter with Wednesday, a ragtag group of up-and-coming indie rockers out of Asheville, North Carolina. It was the lead single from Twin Plagues, the group’s breakout album. On Twin Plagues’ cover, Karly stands in a junkyard, dwarfed by stacks of totaled cars rusting in the sunlight. The image itself looks the way the record sounds, or more accurately, the way it feels: hot, dusty, cluttered, crumbling. You can see the thickness of the air around her, and you can hear it in every guitar screech, every cinderblock-heavy layer of distortion, every whine escaping from the lap steel guitar.
Though I loved Twin Plagues when I first heard it, I didn’t fully get it until about a year after it came out. I was a lifelong Northerner, born and raised in Brooklyn, but in the fall of 2022 I moved down to the Carolinas for grad school. My primary connection to the South had been through the Southern rock and alt-country my dad used to play when I was growing up. On his car stereo, Drive-By Truckers, Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, and Townes Van Zandt reigned supreme. Now that I was living alone—and in the South—for the first time, albums that were on heavy rotation in my father’s minivan, like Southern Rock Opera and Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, became the middle ground between what was familiar to me and what was new. Also in the middle of that Venn diagram of familiarity and unfamiliarity was Wednesday, whose music stands on the shoulders of those giants.
During my first few months sweating it out in an eastern North Carolina college town, Twin Plagues (and Wednesday guitarist Jake “MJ” Lenderman’s 2022 solo record, Boat Songs) kept me company and made my new surroundings feel like home. Although the stories from these records mostly took place across the state from me in Asheville—and some of them in Greensboro, where Karly grew up—there was a distinct North Carolina-ness to their music. The layers of distortion piled on top of Lenderman’s riffs are the sonic equivalent of the sweltering humidity I’d never known until I experienced a Carolina summer. I could try to describe how a hot, lazy afternoon by the Wilmington Riverwalk feels, but then I listen to the golden slide of Xandy Chelmis’s lap steel and realize I’ll never come closer than that. When I hear Karly Hartzman whisper and wail about ghosts in backyards, kitschy off-kilter billboards, and condemned buildings that are as beautiful as they are creepy, it felt like she was giving me a hand-drawn map to all the curiosities I was discovering in real time.
The layers of distortion piled on top of Lenderman’s riffs are the sonic equivalent of the sweltering humidity I’d never known until I experienced a Carolina summer.
It’s too-easy music writer shorthand to describe shoegaze as “sludgy” or country as “twangy,” but the way Wednesday merges these strains of sound to mythologize the everyday oddities of their home state feels like they’re holding a microphone up to things that have been lurking there all along.
Today's Southern Gothic Sound
An up-and-coming generation of Southern musicians are spinning the oddities of the South’s past and present into new musical narratives that blur the boundaries between the mundane and the mythical, adopting the ethos and touchpoints of writers and artists who turned the term “Southern Gothic” into cultural currency.
The dereliction and decay that have long been staples of Southern Gothic art and literature are still present in this modern movement, with musicians often taking these landscapes to apocalyptic extremes. Hattiesburg genre-benders MSPAINT have sought out to make “Hattiesburg World” global, bringing dystopian electro-hardcore from Mississippi to the masses with their debut album Post-American. Straying from the traditional punk band setup, MSPAINT have swapped out guitars for synthesizers as their leading melodic instrument. Frontman DeeDee’s “chaos poetry” melds aesthetic elements of sci-fi and Southern Gothic into visions of post-apocalyptic Americana.
The 2023 sophomore LP from Palm Coast, Florida’s Home Is Where offers a fifth-wave emo take on Southern Gothic; frontwoman Brandon MacDonald calls The Whaler “a concept album about getting used to things getting worse.”
“There’s no room on the roadside for any more memorials,” MacDonald wails on the opening track, titled “skin meadow”—– a fitting introduction for a record littered with images of mangled, rotting things. The grotesque, hyper-physical horrors on the record are often abstracted from MacDonald’s experiences as a trans woman directly affected by the nightmarish legislation in her home state. In Home Is Where songs, surrealism is not an escapist tool, but a funhouse mirror that MacDonald holds up to reality. Her fascination with Florida’s idiosyncrasies is just as prominent in her songwriting and her band’s identity as her anger at the state’s oppressive policies.
Another trans, Florida-born musician, Hayden Anhedonia, better known by her stage name, Ethel Cain, is perhaps the most prominent example of Southern Gothic’s current musical moment—one whose experimental pop songs about religious trauma and the myth of the American Dream subvert expectations at every turn. Ethel Cain is a character that Anhedonia created, the tragic heroine of her debut record Preacher’s Daughter. Influenced by outlaw country music, Christian rock, doom metal, and alt-pop stars like Florence and the Machine and Lana Del Rey, the songs on Preacher’s Daughter are racked with stomach-churning violence and skin-crawling seediness. Still, none of it ever seems to dull her love for God or the American South.
There is no one way to tell Southern stories, and each of these artists is engraving their own into the South’s multifaceted musical history, but not all of the music of today’s Southern Gothic renaissance is from newcomers. Oh Me Oh My, the 2023 record from Birmingham-born folk artist, filmmaker, and experimental musician Lonnie Holley, is haunted by ghosts of Holley's impoverished youth and the broader darkness of Southern history that was thrust upon him as a child of Jim Crow-era Alabama—all while ringing with the urgent promise of Black perseverance as integral to Southern culture. Shaped by the lifelong traumas of an abusive foster home, a near-fatal childhood car accident, the deaths of several family members, and his experiences at what was essentially a prison and 20th-century plantation for Black schoolchildren—as well as his resilience and resourcefulness in the face of countless struggles—Holley’s art has always been an effort to construct something new from yesterday’s rubble. He does not simply triumph over the atrocities of the past, but imagines a new future while refusing to let audiences ignore the horrific history from which it arises. Whether he's working in a visual or audio medium, he’s been a titan of Southern Gothic art for decades. Everything he creates embodies the dichotomies of past and present, horror and holiness, the grand and the grotesque.
Fitting into this multi-genre and multi-generational collage of Southern Gothic is Wednesday’s latest record, Rat Saw God. The title, lifted from a Veronica Mars episode of the same name, evokes the central contrast of Southern Gothic: a lowly creature living in decay gazes upon the face of ultimate holiness, and thus becomes holy himself. Its purposefully anachronistic cover art—a photograph of an oil painting done by former Wednesday bassist Margo Schultz—shows the band members posing for a family portrait in what looks like the parlor of an antebellum mansion. Dressed in a long white gown, Karly stares head-on, her mouth dripping with blood. The painting itself is nestled in tall grass, the night sky surrounding it and reaching all the way down to touch the leaves.
Like a Flannery O’Connor short story—Karly cites the author as one of her biggest influences—the songs on Rat Saw God treat the sacred and the grotesque as one and the same. It’s a record that digs up divinity in the dirt and goes down like spiked holy water. It’s what you get when your hymns are written by an Appalachian Jewish girl who spent her youth breaking into community pools after hours and showing up to school hungover the next morning (that is, if she bothered to show up at all).
Resurrection imagery abounds in unlikely places—on “Chosen to Deserve” when a teenager blacked out on Benadryl gets his stomach pumped, on “Got Shocked” when Karly wakes up after getting electrocuted by her own guitar amp, on “Bath County” in the form of a lifesaving shot of Narcan, and on “Turkey Vultures” when Karly transcends the confines of her physical form while the titular scavenging birds gather to praise Jesus. On Rat Saw God’s love songs, the greatest romantic expressions come in the form of references to car crashes and rusty kitchen appliances (“Formula One”) and stories about teenage delinquency (“Chosen to Deserve”). The record’s most ardent declaration of love is delivered not in sweet whisper, but a violent shriek that takes Ronnie Spektor’s iconic chorus to morbid depths—“Be my baby till my body’s in the ground!”
A Home for Asheville Artists
“A lot of things that people see as creepy in the South are actually comforting to me,” Karly tells me from her porch. “I’m more creeped out by city life, like the lack of space and the overbearing sounds. I find that I’m using the Southern Gothic thing as my safety blanket. Appalachia has this reputation for being creepy, but I find it so comforting.”
Our conversation takes place the day before the release of Wednesday’s documentary, The Rat Bastards of Haw Creek, directed by collaborator and longtime friend of the band Zach Romeo. His camera pans over the lush green acres where most of the band has lived for years. Scenes of each band member going about their everyday activities in Haw Creek, in a valley east of Asheville, play out in an idyllic montage—Karly at her sewing machine, Jake fishing in the river, drummer Alan Miller playing chess in a backyard, bassist Ethan Baechtold messing around on the piano, lap steel player Xandy Chelmis tending to his crops and gathering fresh eggs from his chickens. These flashes of peaceful afternoons at home are interspersed with loud, busy footage from the Rat Saw God tour. Along with a few friends and neighbors, the band members have rented a stunning, secluded stretch of rolling farmland and turned it into their own little artist colony. Haw Creek, like much of Western North Carolina, serves as the backdrop for Wednesday’s tangle of stories and secrets.
Beyond just her neighborhood, Karly credits Asheville DIY institutions like the recently defunct venue The Mothlight with promoting independent musicians in various career stages and cultivating a thriving local scene: “They really prioritized making sure the bands from here were getting noticed.” She also shouts out Drop of Sun, where Wednesday has recorded all of its albums, and the studio’s resident producer Alex Farrar, who’s worked with other local legends like Indigo De Souza, Angel Olsen, and Archers of Loaf. Perhaps most significant of all is Drop of Sun’s sliding scale prices and willingness to accommodate bands with smaller recording budgets: “It's mostly financial, funnily enough. Just like, having a culture that supports music that is still finding itself.” To a hometown musician who’s put in the hours, their local scene getting widespread buzz can be a double-edged sword. When I ask Karly if she’s conflicted about Asheville’s indie-music cachet going up—does she feel like they've let the secret out?—her response is balanced and nuanced:
“There are a lot of negative things associated with the South,” Karly says, “and the more I travel the more I realize that the South has those stereotypes because it’s overt—the racism and the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric—but that shit is everywhere.”
“It makes sense,” she says. “It's a beautiful place. The musicians moving here isn't—well, it is a sign of gentrification, but I think the thing that I'm actually bitter about is the rich retirees moving here, because that's what's actually driving up the rent. It's these people that don't participate in the communities, but just want to, like, look at the pretty trees. And I get why. Our whole generation doesn't have access to that money anymore and we're definitely getting pushed out, but that's a cycle that will continue everywhere.”
Beyond just Asheville or even North Carolina, Wednesday are a loudly and proudly Southern band, one with a strong regional identity that few of their contemporaries have, even ones that emerged from tight-knit local scenes. As a band who wears their geographically specific culture on their sleeves, Wednesday are both blessed with the opportunity to show audiences near and far what makes their home so special, and cursed with the burden of being tokenized or feeling like they have to speak for the South’s entire, infinitely varied demographic. The members of Wednesday take deep pride in their Southern roots, are vocal about their progressive values, and do not see these things as mutually exclusive. I ask Karly about the baggage that comes with being a capital-S Southern Rock band.
Talking Truckers
“There are a lot of negative things associated with the South,” Karly says, “and the more I travel the more I realize that the South has those stereotypes because it’s overt—the racism and the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric—but that shit is everywhere.”
She brings up an anecdote that Drive-By Truckers co-frontman Mike Cooley once shared in an interview: “He said that the most racist idiots he’d ever encountered on tour were in Northern California.”
One of the biggest misconceptions about the South, Karly explains, is that people in the rest of the country often fail to acknowledge the work of those who know that their communities deserve better and are actively pushing back against the reactionary policies that directly endanger them. The South’s reputation for racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other regressive ideologies is often what makes progressive Southerners so dedicated to improving the conditions where they live. It can be easy to get complacent in places where political and social injustices manifest in more subtle ways, but when these negative norms are obvious and in-your-face, they’re harder to ignore.
Rat Saw God makes no overt political statements. The closest it gets is a joke about an old lady who calls America “a spoiled child that’s ignorant of grief,” but passes out full-size chocolate bars to trick-or-treaters. Still, the album holds a running theme of seeing a person, place, or community with all its imperfections on display and choosing to love it anyway. It’s something akin to what Drive-By Truckers co-frontman Patterson Hood once identified as “the duality of the Southern Thing.”
The album holds a running theme of seeing a person, place, or community with all its imperfections on display and choosing to love it anyway. It’s something akin to what Drive-By Truckers co-frontman Patterson Hood once identified as “the duality of the Southern Thing.”
I knew it was only a matter of time before either Karly or I brought up the Drive-By Truckers (she beat me to it). I was eager to talk Truckers with her, especially since I’d just seen them play a show at Wilmington’s Green Lake Amphitheater a few weeks prior. Wednesday have a special relationship with the Drive-By Truckers, going from longtime fans to tourmates after the Truckers heard Wednesday and MJ Lenderman’s collab cover of their song “Women Without Whiskey.” The two bands exist in the same Southern Rock lineage, and share an affinity for vivid, place-based narratives and thick twang wrapped in even thicker guitar fuzz. Karly admires the way that the Truckers “prioritize storytelling in their songs without giving up good riffs to get there.” She also commends their strong sense of community values, and how that extends to their support of up-and-coming musicians: “I really appreciate a band that goes out of their way to be kind to the next generation of music happening.”
When Wednesday released “Chosen to Deserve” as the second promotional single for Rat Saw God, Karly explained that the song was an attempt at writing her own version of the Truckers’ “Let There Be Rock.” Even if she hadn’t explicitly stated this intention, the link between the two songs is palpable. Both “Let There Be Rock” and “Chosen to Deserve” see their narrators rattling off teenage indiscretions ranging from “kind of embarrassing” to “it’s a goddamn miracle that this somehow didn’t get me killed.” On both songs, the tone is of acceptance rather than regret. The main difference between the two is that “Let There Be Rock” fits into the broader historical narrative about the rise and fall of Lynyrd Skynyrd that spans most of DBT’s 2001 landmark album Southern Rock Opera, while “Chosen to Deserve” frames these confessions within the context of a love song. Sharing not-so-flattering stories from one’s past is treated as a relationship milestone, the key to a higher level of trust and vulnerability as well as a caution sign warning a new partner just what they’re getting themself into.
Beyond just their thematic similarities, “Let There Be Rock” and “Chosen to Deserve” work as a sort of intergenerational duo, revealing unchanging truths about teenage rebellion and stupidity. If “Let There Be Rock” is a reformed delinquent dad, “Chosen to Deserve” is his loveable dirtbag daughter learning the same hard lessons. Listening to the two songs back to back feels like finally being old enough to find out about the trouble your parents got into when they were your age, and realizing that they too were once young and dumb.
“Bath County,” the track that follows “Chosen to Deserve,” shouts out the Truckers by name. This namedrop comes at the emotional and sonic peak of a song rife with Truckers-esque lyrical turns: an “exodus” from Dollywood, the particular shade of yellow Fanta being described as “piss-colored,” a couplet that rhymes “dose of Narcan” with “two-door sedan.” When the band is invoked, it’s in a moment of much needed catharsis. Karly doesn’t name the specific Drive-By Truckers songs that soundtrack the ride home, just that she’s playing them the way they were meant to be played—“real loud.”
A Living Archive
I bring up “Bath County” again during a discussion about the intersection between Karly’s Southern identity and her Jewish identity. “Bath County” doesn’t contain any overt references to Judaism—the only Rat Saw God track that does is “Quarry,” in a one-liner about Karly’s uncle (“the kid from the Jewish family”) getting the preacher’s daughter pregnant as a teenager. But the sensibility and humor of “Bath County” feels Jewish in a way that’s difficult to put my finger on. It’s reminiscent of the late Virginia-born songwriter and poet David Berman’s work, with its nods to an outsider status (especially in relation to Christianity), the way it meets dark topics with deadpan humor, and a shrugging “it could be worse”-style acceptance of less-than-ideal circumstances. Some friends and I have developed a running joke of invoking the song’s hook line—“every daughter of God has a little bad luck sometimes”—each time any of us is met with an inconvenience, big or small.
Karly’s Jewish upbringing in the South feels wildly different from my own: being raised in New York City, Jewish culture felt so immediate and so interwoven into the city itself that it could almost go unnoticed. It wasn't until I moved away that I fully grasped the fact that Jewish community in most parts of the country was something one would have to actively search for.
Christianity looms large in Karly’s songwriting—not always in spite of her Jewishness but sometimes because of it. She went to Vacation Bible School as a kid because all her friends went and her mother didn’t want her to feel left out. In a 2022 tumblr post, she showed off the many Christmas decorations around her parents’ house. Rather than writing about Judaism directly in her songs, Karly often writes around it, or, on songs like “Bath County,” writes about Christianity from the perspective of an outside observer. She has a unique viewpoint, having experienced the aspects of Christianity that are inherent to growing up in the South with a lot of friends from conservative Christian homes, but without the religious trauma that her friends experienced directly.
“I didn't really experience the idea of hell or hating my sexual body or all of those things that I would have maybe been encouraged to believe had I had the typical Southern identity, which involves Christianity. So I mostly just find it really interesting, because I have no emotional connection with it.”
“Writing is collecting words, and sewing is collecting fabric and arranging it into something that makes sense. They have the through-line of just picking things that I gravitate toward or feel like I identify with and hoarding them.”
It might seem odd that a Jewish songwriter would write so much about Christianity, but it makes sense considering how observational and speculative Karly’s songwriting is. She defines herself in relation to her surroundings, taking in stories from the world around her and filtering them through the lens of her own voice and experiences. Her descriptions of the places in which she exists reveal truths about her interior world. Her songs juxtapose personal narratives with literary or musical references, but even when she’s pulling from external influences, the stories still feel like her own. At least, they always feel like they make logical sense in the Wednesday Musical Universe.
“That's a muscle that I've built over years and years of figuring out what specifically makes something that I like or find beautiful,” she tells me, when I ask about her songwriting process. “When I see myself or something that speaks to me in anything—a conversation or a show or a book—I know what that is immediately at this point and can figure out a way to tie it into a story about my own life.”
It’s not just her songwriting; there’s a fragmented, pieced-together quality to everything Karly creates. It’s in her zines, the pieces of Wednesday merch that she custom-makes in her home, this intricate and delightfully kitschy mirror that she decorated herself. The way she describes it, her approach to songwriting isn’t unlike her approach to visual art and fashion design. They’re all activities that put her into a “flow state” and ground her creative energy in something tangible.
“The central theme of it all is collecting,” she says. “Writing is collecting words, and sewing is collecting fabric and arranging it into something that makes sense. They have the through-line of just picking things that I gravitate toward or feel like I identify with and hoarding them.”
Regardless of the medium Karly’s working in, there’s an archival impulse at the heart of all of her creative pursuits. Whether it’s the meticulous home-video-style documentation of her life on tour and at home, the one-of-a-kind works of fiber art she creates with her sewing machine, or the stray stories she spins into narrative lyrics for her songs, she’s always figuratively or literally stitching together pieces of the past (hers or someone else’s) to ensure they don’t fade away.
The catalyst for Karly’s drive to archive was the unexpected death of a close friend during her high school years. At the time, social media had yet to reach its current ubiquity, and Karly was struck by just how little recorded evidence of this friend remained with her: “I had a few things that I treasured that had them speaking—a video from a little camera or something. I was like, I need to have as many pieces of my life as I can, because so quickly it could be gone.” Memory preservation has been central to every artistic endeavor she’s embarked on since.
Since 2017, Karly has been uploading monthly video diaries to her YouTube channel, each one a compilation of various short clips, moving snapshots of her daily life. In recent years, they’ve turned into tour diaries or micro-documentaries about the band, rife with performance footage, travel montages, and candid scenes of Wednesday’s members and collaborators goofing around.
After returning home from Wednesday’s 2023 summer tour where, toward the end, all the days began to blur together, Karly took comfort in revisiting the videos from it and seeing how live versions of songs had changed, even over the course of just a few weeks. The way she describes it, the ephemeral singularity of a live performance and the lasting joy of having captured it on film are intertwined.
“We improved so much as musicians by the end,” she says. “I've watched those [videos] recently just to remember that we fucking did that. It was so crazy, and we're never gonna do it quite like that again.”
Karly isn’t alone in her quest to archive her band’s history as they’re living it. Her mother is currently putting together the latest of four Wednesday scrapbooks, which she’s been using to document the band’s evolution since they first formed. Karly confesses that unlike her videos, she doesn’t feel quite ready to revisit the contents of those scrapbooks quite yet: “I don't think I'm far enough away to look at that many pictures of myself, but I know I'll appreciate it looking back when I’m older.” She’s the same way with a lot of press coverage of her band—being too tapped into the (glowing) reviews gets her “too much in my head”—but she knows she’ll be grateful for them when she’s further removed from the moments that they document.
Karly’s lyrics have an immersive quality, whether she’s dropping the listener into a bullfight (“Bull Believer”), a suburban street full of eccentric locals (“Quarry”), a bad trip in the dollar store (“TV in the Gas Pump”), a Planet Fitness parking lot where an unexpected tragedy strikes (“Bath County”), or a miserable New Year’s Eve party (“Bull Believer” again). As listeners, we’re more than just recipients of Karly’s tales: we’re a part of her world whether we like it or not. We’re wrinkling our noses at the smell of rotting grass, we’re singing along to the Drive-By Truckers in her backseat, we’re gathering in the yard to gawk at the neighbors as they get arrested in a drug bust. When Karly unleashes a savage, heavy-metal howl during the final stretch of “Bull Believer,” we scream along, drowning in sound until all our voices lay shredded in a heaping pile and we can’t tell where each other’s end and hers begins.
“I get so attached to how things feel in the moment,” Karly says, “I want to have a way to be immediately transported back anytime I want.”
Unfortunately though, you can’t hold onto everything. Toward the end of The Rat Bastards Of Haw Creek, it’s revealed that the Wednesday rock-doc is also a farewell to the band’s longtime home. Following the death of the property’s owner, Gary (immortalized in song on Twin Plagues), Wednesday’s little corner of Haw Creek was bought by a developer, and the band members who still lived there were priced out. Karly and lifelong Asheville resident Jake Lenderman have plans to move to Greensboro next year, leaving behind the place that’s been Wednesday’s home turf since the band’s formation in 2017.
As the documentary draws to a close, a montage of the band members in various parts of their neighborhood—wandering down dirt roads, laughing in backyards, waving from plastic chairs on porches—flickers across the screen as a live rendition of “Quarry” plays us out, its rousing chorus a reminder that eventually, reality will always step in: “We had to add it to the tab/To die we had to settle up/But we just go until we can’t.” Finally, the Haw Creek b-roll footage gives way to a video of Wednesday performing to an adoring crowd. The winding distortion slows, the drums skitter to a stop, and the hand-written credits begin to roll over a round of rowdy applause for a group of rat bastards turned rock stars.
