Formula One

This song arrives like a freight train entering a tunnel — enormous, distorted, rattling the walls. Wednesday's "Formula One" is built on a wall of fuzz guitar that teeters on the edge of collapse without ever actually falling, and underneath it, Asheville's peculiar brand of Southern gothic indie rock runs full throttle. The pedal steel weaves through the distortion like something incongruous and beautiful, a country instrument buried in noise-rock rubble, and the contrast between those two textures is central to what Wednesday does so well. Karly Hartzman's voice has a raw, flat-voweled quality that feels confessional without performing vulnerability — she sounds like someone narrating her own disaster in real time, not from a safe retrospective distance. The song is about speed, momentum, the specific thrill and terror of being unable to stop — and the production literalizes this: it accelerates and stays accelerated, refusing to let up. There's a Midwest emo lineage running through Wednesday's DNA, but filtered through Appalachian grit and the specific atmospheric weight of a region that doesn't fit neatly into American music's usual categories. "Formula One" is a song for driving too fast on an empty highway at dusk, windows down, with something unresolved pressing at the back of your sternum. It's one of the defining documents of the early 2020s underground rock revival — the moment when a certain kind of noisy, honest, regionally-rooted guitar music felt necessary again.