Wednesday cast back to their youth through wisened eyes on Rat Saw God

And while there are elements of both country and shoegaze throughout Rat Saw God, they rarely appear side-by-side. Instead, Wednesday operates in two distinct modes: they pull from shoegaze progenitors like Swirlies or lean into energetic alternative country a la Drive-By Truckers (who get a shoutout on “Bath County”). As disparate as the styles are, Rat Saw God never feels disjointed.

Opener “Hot Rotten Grass Smell” is a 90-second burst of feedback and fuzz, leading into the eight-and-a-half minute “Bull Believer”. Wednesday’s most ambitious track, “Bull Believer” is a two-part suite that careens from a bullring to a house party to an ex’s bedroom, from a screeching shoegaze riff to a metallic coda. As memories come into sharper focus, the band ratchets up the distortion and the track becomes nearly impenetrable – a blanket of noise that wouldn’t feel out of place on Cloakroom's Dissolution Wave.

This contrasts with the dreamy “Got Shocked”, which buzzes along at a placid tempo – a comedown after the high of the stormy conclusion of “Bull Believer”, and serves to smooth out the transition to the folksy “Formula One”. Drenched in lap steel, “Formula One” embodies the band’s country tendencies; thus, the sonic boundaries are set within the first half of the record. It’s only on the ever-expanding “Turkey Vultures” where the band resembles anything called countrygaze. Beginning as a steel guitar-flecked ballad, the track unfurls into a noisy, cathartic dream pop whirlwind over its four-minute runtime – a concise demonstration of all of Wednesday’s identities.

But “Chosen to Deserve” steals the show. Surely the band’s crowning achievement and a contender for song of the year, the single finds vocalist/guitarist Karly Hartzman rifling through a scrapbook of teenage memories: “I used to drink til I threw up on weeknights in my parent's house,” “I was out late sneaking into the neighbourhood pool,” “I went to school about three days out of the week.” She closes it out by flash-cutting to the present, crowing, “Now all the drugs are getting kind of boring to me / now everywhere is loneliness and it’s in everything.” It’s wrapped in triumphant, whirring alt-country licks – Rat Saw God at its best. At 25, Hartzman’s old enough to romanticize her youth but world-weary enough not to try recapturing it. The space between the two – reckless childhood and cynical maturity – is where Wednesday resides, but they manage to find beauty in it all.