Wednesday - Rat Saw God

Rat Saw God is the fifth studio album by American rock band Wednesday, released in April 2023 via Dead Oceans.

Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighbourhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field.

Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void somehow you see everything.

Rat Saw God was written in the months immediately following Twin Plagues completion, and recorded in a week at Asheville s Drop of Sun studio. While Twin Plagues was a breakthrough release critically for Wednesday, it was also a creative and personal breakthrough for Hartzman. The lauded record charts feeling really fucked up, trauma, dropping acid. It had Hartzman thinking about the listener, about her mom hearing those songs, about how it feels to really spill your guts. And in the end, it felt okay. I really jumped that hurdle with Twin Plagues where I was not worrying at all really about being vulnerable I was finally comfortable with it, and I really wanna stay in that zone.

This album is a limited edition on purple coloured vinyl housed in single pocket sleeve with a 14 page booklet and download, pressed in the US via Dead Oceans.