Wednesday - Twin Plagues (2023) Hi-Res

What does “indie rock” even mean? This has been a subject of much contention over the years, especially as the term has come to encompass music neither released on an independent label nor particularly rock-oriented in genre. There’s a lot to think about there for people who gives a shit about such distinctions, but the simplest answer is that you know it when you hear it. And to these ears, Wednesday are as indie rock as it gets.
Full of hard-hitting, guitar-powered tracks and released on Chicago-based Orindal Records (home of Julie Byrne, Advance Base, Gia Margaret, and Dear Nora among others), Twin Plagues — the new album from Asheville quintet Wednesday — qualifies objectively as independent rock music. But Karly Hartzman’s band also taps into a certain ideal of the genre as established in the late ’80s and early ’90s: shrouded in fuzz yet melodic and approachable, sometimes lackadaisical but occasionally explosive. Think Pavement. Think Sonic Youth. Think Cat Power. Think of that iconic Dinosaur Jr./My Bloody Valentine tour that deafened Gen X hipsters across America, of Yo La Tengo and Liz Phair and the Breeders. You know: indie rock.

Bands have been revisiting such foundational indie sounds again for a good solid decade at least, if they ever stopped. At this stage of the nostalgia cycle — after a decade that started with Parquet Courts and Yuck and ended with Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy, with no shortage of ’90s throwbacks in between — if you’re channeling these influences, you’d better be throwing heat. Fortunately, Wednesday have delivered a scorcher. These 12 songs feel dangerously volatile, like the distortion might actually leap out and burn you if you come too close. They’re just as weighty when they quiet down, as if burdened with a world-weariness that refuses to dissipate. Chalk it up to Hartzman’s vivid, vulnerable writing, as well as the crunching down-tuned guitar riffs she and Jake Lenderman unleash throughout. And save some credit for producers Alex Farrar and Adam McDaniel, who’ve ensured that everything sounds bracingly visceral and raw. Even songs like “Handsome Man” and “Toothache,” so accessible and melodic that you could almost slide them into an old MTV Buzz Bin compilation, course with urgency and barely contained chaos.

If Wednesday initially scan as yet another band working in a well-traveled tradition, they quickly begin to stand out for the unique way they swirl disparate aesthetics into that old slacker-rock template. The emphasis varies from song to song: They occasionally edge up to monolithically gloomy alt-metal, as on the absolutely filthy title track; there are frequent doses of shoegaze (best exemplified by “One More Last Time”) and its close cousin, noise-pop (behold the gorgeously discordant racket on “Three Sisters”); between Hartzman’s baked-in North Carolina twang and well-placed lap steel flourishes from Xandy Chelmis, there’s a lot of country in the mix, particularly on sparse ballads like “How Can You Live If You Can’t Love How Can You If You Do.”