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Wednesday, 'Bull Believer'

"God, make me good / but not quite yet," Karly Hartzman – lead singer of the Ashville, N.C., rock band Wednesday – snarls in the band's new monster of a single, "Bull Believer." The line is an incendiary nod to what comes next: Hartzman's guttural release as she repeats, "Finish him" over the sounds of MJ Lenderman's explosive guitar and Xandy Chelmis' distorted lap steel for the last four minutes of this eight-and-a-half-minute track.

"This song is an excuse for me to scream on stage," says Hartzman, who sings with a bloody tampon hanging from her nostril in the song's sublimely turbulent music video. She adds that it's "an offering to myself of a brief moment of release from being tolerant of the cruelty of life: feels like cutting my hair to let go of the history it holds."

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Elle Mannion
[Copyright 2024 NPR]