A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter / vocalist / guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. ‘Rat Saw God’, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic.

Across the album’s ten tracks, Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller and lap / pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din.

‘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.

The songs on ‘Rat Saw God’ don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.” But the thing about ‘Rat Saw God’ – and about any Wednesday song, really – is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits.

‘Rat Saw God’ will be released alongside long awaited vinyl reissues of Wednesday’s previous releases, ‘Twin Plagues’ and ‘I was Trying to Describe You to Someone’.

Available to independent retailers on Clear Sunspot coloured vinyl.