The Bellwether

Wednesday is a band from North Carolina led by Karly Hartzman, with guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Ethan Baechtold, drummer Alan Miller, and pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from the American South unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, Wednesday’s music defies categorization. Hartzman calls it “creek rock” – there are sleepy country-imbued love songs, moments of screaming hardcore propulsion, distorted pedal steel and Hartzman’s sweet voice slicing through the din.

Hartzman, the songwriter/vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners, in constant awe of memory and the minutiae of everyday life in North Carolina, she’s an empathetic writer weaving together the weight of memories and possibility of what’s next into one patchwork of sound.

Wednesday’s most recent album, 2023’s Rat Saw God, was released to global critical acclaim from the likes of Rolling Stone, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New York Times, AP, and many other major publications across the globe. On the heels of that release, the band toured extensively and internationally, headlining sold-out shows across the US, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand across the last several years.

Growing up in the northeast San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, there was nothing for kids to do. Adrian Acosta (songwriter, vocalist, guitarist), ran the DIY punk scene movement there as a preteen. Backyard shows happened every weekend by word of mouth and flyers at school, with some shows ending in drive by shootings from rival gangs. As a kid, Adrian purposely used warped tapes and dissonant sounds without understanding what he loved about it, but upon discovering artists such as My Bloody Valentine, Boards of Canada, and Throbbing Gristle, he realized he wasn’t the only one. Adrian started Draag in 2013 and met Ray Montes (guitar), Nick Kelley (bass), Nathan Najera (drums), through many years in the DIY LA music community. He met Jessica Huang (synth, vocals) through an ad on Craigslist. She had a different musical upbringing, classically trained in piano and played the alto sax in marching band, and was on tumblr instead of at backyard shows.

Five-piece Draag gained a reputation for their sonically immersive live shows, mostly by word of mouth. Draag interweaves shoegaze, electro-industrial, and punk elements into a bittersweet ballad. Over the years they’ve aligned themselves with bands who subvert the shoegaze genre into something far more interesting. Each release (EPs “Nontoxic Process,” “Clara Luz,” “Actually, the quiet is nice” and LP “Dark Fire Heresy”) is self-produced and immersed in stacked layers of guitar, nintendo era synths, and warped and reversed tape samples. Both the sonic and visual worlds reach back into the past in order for it to not be erased. They archive what it’s like growing up with immigrant parents in the valley, and personal journeys with sobriety and religious trauma. As people of color, you sometimes get messaging that your story isn’t worth telling. Draag endlessly documents their histories, and the personal analog media that would otherwise be forgotten. Their upcoming EP “Miracle Drug” materializes family history; the cover features Adrian’s dad, an established norteño musician, on a public access television show in the late 90s, which was uncovered in a pile of home videos in the TV cabinet at Adrian’s parent’s house. This EP is a precursor to a larger body of work.