Wednesday’s Rat Saw God, released in April 2023, arrived with enough critical attention to suggest that the Asheville-based band was about to become significantly more famous than they had been. That attention was deserved. The album is one of the better rock records of the decade so far, and it works in a register that rock music had not occupied with this much confidence in some time.

Wednesday is led by singer Karly Hartzman, whose voice occupies an unusual space between the conversational and the operatic. She sings like someone telling you something important across a kitchen table and also like someone who cannot stop herself from being a little theatrical about it, and the combination is specific enough to be immediately recognizable. The band behind her, particularly guitarist MJ Lenderman, plays with a looseness that sounds effortless and is probably not.

Rat Saw God is a record about growing up in the American South, about the specific textures of a regional experience that the music made famous in the 1990s, about what it means to be alive in a place that has a lot of mythology attached to it. Hartzman writes with the kind of specific detail that makes a lyric feel true even when you have no connection to the place or experience it describes.

The album runs through country, shoegaze, and Pavement-adjacent indie rock without committing fully to any of them, and it maintains a coherence that records of this ambition often lack. It is a record that sounds like a band discovering what they are, which is a rare and valuable quality.