bReview: Wednesday at the Hollywood Avondale

bReview: Wednesday
Sunday 24 May 2026 at The Hollywood Avondale
Photography by Rosa Nevison
Written by Imogene Bedford

Is it better for your heart to be broken or unused? The question hangs like the fogged breath I share with those lined up well before doors for Wednesday. Battered and bruised from the weekend’s proclivities, we’re here at the Hollywood Avondale anyway.

The answer, it turns out, will take all night to arrive. First, Awning.

In a world of algorithmic microgenres, they are an opener that resists being pinned. There are shades of the London windmill scene that never collapse into anything so self-consciously consistent. Pure & Simple would fit comfortably on Marlin’s Dreaming’s record HIRL, while the loping outro of new song Play Dumb evokes Have A Nice Life’s Deathconsciousness. It’s recession indicator rock, sparse arrangements that are rich in abrasive emotion.

(Awning at the Hollywood Avondale / Photo: Rosa Nevison)

The student radio favourites are unhurried but never indifferent performers, justifiably confident in their restraint. In between tracks, the band silently tune with studied focus, and there is an intimacy to watching them work. “Every song is in a different tune, so there’s gonna be some dead air”, lead vocalist Christian Dimick offers, less apology, more decree.

He oozes wounded self-awareness on The Rabbit, the clarity never slackening into relief. “Part of me exercising the right to feel this way”, one lyric runs, and the crowd takes it as a form of permission. “I swear to god, I’m so fucking close”, he says as they again fall into tuning, and the accidental innuendo earns easy laughter.

Guitarist Ethan Broughton provides impressive vocals on Birds, a closing track that makes good on the faith placed in it through a distorted outro of melodic tones. Doom has never sounded so spellbindingly ethereal.

(Awning at the Hollywood Avondale / Photo: Rosa Nevison)

We have a while to wait before Wednesday arrive on stage to their own technical difficulties, effervescent frontwoman Karly Hartzman drinking red wine straight from the bottle while the crowd chatters.

“We’re going to be brave”, she announces, and the five piece open with Reality TV Argument Bleeds, a veritable war of twangy and scratchy strings, delicate in words but nothing else. Starting off as Hartzman’s solo project, the North Carolina group have quietly carved out a definitive place at the centre of the countrygaze moment.

You hear Slowdive in the sludgy textures of Fate Is…, layered feedback and Xandy Chelmis’s pedal steel grinding against each other, and Pinegrove in the folk-confession of it all. But the band’s influences are more far-ranging than others in the same register, and this is clear across their discography.

While debut record I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone is closer to something whispered than screamed, by Rat Saw God, Wednesday had transitioned to doing exactly that, a commitment to hardcore edge now defining.

Accordingly, there’s no staring at shoes tonight. Wound Up Here (By Holdin On) drags itself back into the murk, the vocals stretching until they seem close to breaking. The title refrain is a mantra, wrestling with the thin line between hope and delusion over crashing drums. Working class Americana is an undertow throughout. “Weeds grew into the springs of the trampoline,” could describe the scenery of rural Aotearoa as well as it does Asheville.

(Wednesday at the Hollywood Avondale / Photo: Rosa Nevison)

These are songs about the mundane; chipped teeth, carpark arguments, and racking lines of ketamine. Not quite poverty, not quite contentment. It’s ordinary life cast in the right light, art made out of scenes that would otherwise go undocumented.

And what feeling is more utterly mundane than heartache? Before the halfway point of the set, Formula One insists the simplicity of the feeling isn’t overrated. It’s a response to How Can You Live If You Can’t Love How Can You If You Do, unplayed but still ever present. Where the earlier track pulls between infatuation and avoidance, Formula One sees the same person further down the road.

Hartzman dated recording guitarist MJ Lenderman for years, and though the alternative country favourite no longer tours with the band, he lingers like a Southern Gothic ghost. The former couple seem to mirror one another in their songwriting: a Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks for the emotionally intelligent, two people writing around the same relationship in disarming symmetry.

On Pick Up That Knife, she describes a counterpart who seems pathologically incapable of getting out of their own way. “Threw up in the pit at the Death Grips show/In a bottle spit dip and tell dirty-jokes”, she sings, and while the lyric refers to a Primavera Sound incident involving Chelmis, onstage it lands as something more universal.

Caring about someone, Hartzman seems to imply, should never be about who they are at their best. There’s a purity in asking for nothing back. Love is a choice we keep on making in spite of our better judgement, flinching a little less at the feeling each time, even if only to make a song sound a little sweeter.

If Lenderman is for self-confessed loser men, Wednesday is for the people who date them (myself, however unfortunately, included). Forgiveness is freeing, and Hartzman offers it with tender generosity. She asks us if she’s talking too much, and the doubt carries more echoes of songs not on the setlist. The frontwoman languishes in her own fallibility on Chosen to Deserve, admitting there is no villain to blame. She confesses to overselling herself as quickly as she unravels into wordless screams, and it all reads as an easy absolution.

They debut a new song, temporarily and irreverently titled Dune 2 for a conversation with their Kiwi snorkelling instructor on a previous visit. It’s a return to the grungier elements of their earlier records, fuzzed and dirty guitars still finding their shape. But underneath all that distortion Wednesday’s sound maintains an unavoidably romantic sensibility, one that comes from the same place as their rage.

(Wednesday at the Hollywood Avondale / Photo: Rosa Nevison)

Before launching into the nearly nine minute Bull Believer, Hartzman pauses. “The American flag is a fascist symbol right now”, she says, and what follows is not a speech so much as a sermon on the people in power. Genocide, ICE, transphobia: each mention met by shouts from her disciples. “I will be screaming in solidarity with you”, she tells us. “Please scream with me.” No-one needs to be told twice.

The interlude of closing track Wasp is similarly devotional, Hartzman on the floor by the last chord. Feeling everything all at once might border on a form of possession, but even the most grotesque hearts deserve to be well worn. Working that oft bruised muscle so hard is its own reward.

It seems entirely appropriate that the band’s most recent album is called Bleeds, like a wound you can’t stop picking at. Gentle around the edges, the band suggests there is a dignity in refusing to be hardened. It’s all softness in the end, just softness that has learned to make a lot of noise. And really, is the world you want to live in one of silence?