Hailing from Asheville, North Carolina, Wednesday are the latest signing to Owen Ashworth’s Orindal Records, known for releases from the likes of Friendship, Lisa/Liza and Gia Margaret.  Wednesday formed back in 2017, initially a collaboration between two of their three guitarists, Karly Hartman and Daniel Gorham, while they were students. They subsequently released their debut album, Yep, Definitely, in their own words, “a whimsical synth-pop” record, heavily influenced by The Sundays, who also gave the band their name. Now graduated and expanded to their current five piece line-up, Wednesday are currently gearing up to the February release of their second album, I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone, and today we’re premiering the first two tracks to be shared from it, Fate Is… and Billboard.

Not just the first single, Fate Is…, is also the opening track on I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone, and fittingly it kicks in with the intensity you’d expect; the opening thirty seconds are the purest of guitar noise, sludgy, dense and rather thrilling. After that Karly’s contrasting voice cuts through the wall of sound, it’s an instrument that possesses both a delicacy and a snarl, it pierces the musical fug but isn’t afraid to yelp and howl when the moment calls for it, as in the chorus where the line, “only reason that I did it was to find out what its like”, is delivered with ever increasing fury.

Billboard is a different, yet no less intriguing offering, a woozy number indebted to shoe gaze and slide-guitar in equal measure. The lead guitar seems to enter a little punch-drunk and only gets more unhinged from there, by the end it’s notes seem to arrive almost at random, piercing bursts of sound, that add an uneasy quality to the fuzzy, low-end aural assault. If the music seems to possess a certain darkness that as a listener, you can’t quite put your finger on, it’s equally mirrored in the lyrics, “I’m creeping myself out again, I had to call all of your friends, someone had to tell me, don’t go back there again”. It’s open-ended, shrouded in mystery, ready for a thousand personal interpretations, and all the better for it.

The two tracks here seem to serve as siren songs to the record as a whole, they draw you, as a listener, in, and make you want to hear where they’ll take you next. It might not always be an easy journey to take, yet on this evidence Wednesday are a band whose intoxicating qualities might be impossible to ignore.

I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone is out February 7th via Orindal Records and you can pre-order it HERE. Click HERE for more information on Wednesday.