The last time Fleetwood Mac played “Silver Springs” live was in 2015. Stevie Nicks took the stage at Auckland, New Zealand’s Mount Smart Stadium and sang, as she had hundreds of times before, the greatest break-up ballad ever put to tape. Mere feet away was Lindsey Buckingham, the man she’d written it about nearly 40 years prior, harmonizing on the chorus. Such feats of sustained annihilation are, by definition, tenuous—Buckingham himself has quit Fleetwood Mac twice, once of his own volition and once of Nicks’—so it wasn’t entirely surprising when, in a GQ profile earlier this year, MJ Lenderman confessed that a recent Wednesday show had been his last with the band. A banner 2024 took its toll on the guitarist: Wednesday embarked on five separate tours; Lenderman put out the solo album Manning Fireworks; and one March night in Tokyo, he and Karly Hartzman mutually decided to end their romantic partnership.

On the barnburning, joyriding “Chosen to Deserve,” from Wednesday’s 2023 breakthrough Rat Saw God, Hartzman took account of her youthful misdeeds, “just so you know what you signed up for, what you’re dealing with.” The glow of love makes shadow puppets of shame, guilt, and self-recrimination, only for new fears to take their place. What if you wake up one day and realize I’m not everything you thought I was? The sixth Wednesday album is called Bleeds, and so Hartzman does for 12 tracks, as guitar strings and lap steel wires snag her words like rusty nails. Her writing is as richly fetid as ever—replete with bar brawls, murder-suicides, Afrin addictions, and serial killers—but a bright red yarn of heartbreak wends its way between these songs, little cuts coming together to form one gaping wound.

Unlike, say, Rumours, Bleeds isn’t all explicitly about Lenderman. The album is collage portraiture; from the faces of many men emerges a composite subject, a perennial golden boy who comes away unscathed from confrontations with biker gangs, who could drink nothing but Pepsi and never lose a tooth. Buckingham famously gave as good as he got, but Lenderman lets his guitar fill in for his lines. You can hear every shitty basement gig he’s ever played in the lovers’ quarrel of a solo at the climax of “Bitter Everyday.” When Hartzman does address Lenderman directly, as on “Elderberry Wine,” it’s devastating: “Said I wanna have your baby/Cause I freckle and you tan.” Sweet song is a long con, indeed.

Two years of non-stop touring have made Hartzman a stronger, more expressive singer. She wrote the hardcore thrasher “Wasp” so the band would have something to play after Rat Saw God’s “Bull Believer,” then taught herself how to scream it every night without ruining her voice. Her pained yelps on “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)” could be those of a wounded fox caught in a trap, gnawing off its own leg to escape. But Hartzman’s greatest asset remains her empathy, perhaps inherited from her mother, a social worker for teen moms. She’s the source of “Wound Up Here”’s “pitbull puppy pissin’ off a balcony” line, which gets paired with the image of weeds growing “into the springs of the trampoline.” It’s one perfect couplet among dozens: “Threw up in the pit at the Death Grips show/In a bottle spit dip and tell dirty jokes,” or, “Grocery store sushi/You’re chopping ketamine with a motel room key.” After a career of comparisons—knowingly invited—Hartzman has become the original.

Bleeds takes a relationship that crammed work and life into close quarters and burns down the whole building. “Carolina Murder Suicide” is all the promises of “countrygaze” made manifest, a pile of dry kindling that grows to a roaring inferno. The real-life case of South Carolina’s Murdaugh murders offers Hartzman a safe distance from which to contemplate—maybe even fantasize over—the possibility of mutual self-immolation. On 2021’s Twin Plagues, she quoted James Baldwin, asking “How can you live if you can’t love? How can you if you do?” “Chosen to Deserve” answered one half of the question. Aching, gossamer-thin, “The Way Love Goes” reckons with the other. “You have seen me angry, I know it’s not been easy,” Hartzman intones, “and I know it can’t always be.” She exhales, shrugs. She’ll live.

Despite the rupture at their center, Wednesday have never sounded more like a band you want to be in. Hartzman and Lenderman chose not to tell the other members about the breakup during recording sessions, but lap steel player Xandy Chelmis, drummer Alan Miller, and bassist Ethan Baechtold must’ve absorbed the airborne event in the room, transmuting it into the creeping, loud-quiet-loud tension of opener “Reality TV Argument Bleeds” and “Townies”’ nitroglycerine chorus. The first act of “Pick Up That Knife” vacillates between jackhammering grunge riffs and Hartzman’s desperate chipperness as she tries to keep up a smile, vowing to one day “kill the bitch inside my brain.” Then the bottom drops out, and “Pick Up That Knife” mutates into a magnificent country rock anthem. “They’ll meet you outside,” Hartzman warns, first fearful, then giddy, then downright ecstatic, as jet-thruster guitars kick in and carry the song off into the sunset.

It could’ve only been made after Wednesday’s leap to the indie big leagues, but Bleeds is the spiritual big sister to Twin Plagues. Both albums press right up to the edge of the mix, in contrast to the massive room sound Alex Farrar, who returns here, mustered up on Rat Saw God. They also share characters, like a former landlord of Hartzman’s who gave his name to Twin Plagues’ “Gary’s” and now to its sequel, the rollicking bluegrass number “Gary’s II.” It goes something like this: guy gets ambushed outside a bar by a man who thinks he slept with his wife, loses most of his teeth to a baseball bat, but comes back swinging and takes out the man’s kneecaps. He tells the dentist to “just take out the rest/Even the good ones” and ends up with dentures at the age of 33.

Ending Bleeds on a piece of town gossip and a punchline is both a respite after the emotional outpouring that precedes it and telling of Hartzman’s ambitions. “I’m so obsessed with where I’m from,” she told The New Yorker’s Holden Seidlitz at an intimate solo show last month. “The more I travel, the more obsessed I am with it.” She originally wanted to title the record Carolina Girl. The whole of Bleeds is a tribute to Gary King, who died in 2022, and to Haw Creek, his 27-acre property on the outskirts of Asheville that played host to the local music scene from which Wednesday and a slew of other bands spread like kudzu. There, in a shotgun shack filled with dolls, books, and other knickknacks, two people watched F1 racing and found and lost one another. Nicks and Buckingham are still reaching across the stage, half a century later. Hartzman sits in on tambourine at Lenderman’s shows. Blood springs eternal.