North Carolina Triple Threat: Wednesday, Kerosene Heights, and Eliza McLamb

After being on the road for a week, first traveling up to Ohio for Fauxchella 8, then to Detroit, and finally to Knoxville, I finally made it back home to North Carolina. After a collective 1,900 miles of driving, the Cookout billboards and Cheerwine posters were a sight for sore eyes. In a lovely coincidence, three phenomenal North Carolina acts happened to drop new music today, and it felt like a needed welcome back to the state I’ve been so lucky to call home. Rather than pick any one of them, I decided to do a little North Carolina New Music Roundup, so pour yourself a glass of sweet tea and enjoy. 

Kerosene Heights – “New Tattoo”

SideOneDummy

I don’t know if you guys heard, but it’s a Kerosene Heights Summer. If you’re wondering what that entails, it’s wearing non-stretch denim, getting back on cigarettes, and pretending you ride a motorcycle. For the band, it involves signing to SideOneDummy, playing both Fauxchella and Warped Tour, and continuing to release one emo punk banger after the next. Between lead single “Waste My Time,” last year’s LEAVING EP, and their phenomenal split with Swiss Army Wife, it’s fair to say that Kerosene Heights have been on a roll. 

On their latest heater, “New Tattoo,” the band is leaning into their most You Blew It-style tendencies, opening the song by name-dropping a Floridian city over some punchy riffage. Just like every other Kerosene Heights track, there’s fleet-fingered guitar tapping, a rhythm section that is liable to knock the wind out of you, and a phenomenal sing-along chorus that is immaculately sweet. Everything whips by in a pop-punk sugar rush, which is fitting, given that the song seems to capture the feeling of a newfound love. By the time the band starts warming up to the chorus about 50 seconds in, it feels like you’ve already experienced an entire narrative arc. With lyrical nods to Built to Spill and Motion City Soundtrack, it’s also clear there’s a lot more going on under the hood than any “emo” descriptor could ever entail. Just a goddamn miracle of a band that’s keeping the dream of Southeast Emo alive one track at a time. 

Eliza McLamb – “Quitting”

Royal Mountain Records

Eliza McLamb is a podcaster by day, an indie musician by night, and a newsletter-running advice columnist in between. When she’s not putting in time as one half of the cultural commentary podcast Binchtopia or running one of the most articulate Substack accounts around, she somehow finds the time to pen lush, heartfelt indie music under her own name. McLamb’s debut full-length, Going Through It, was a great initial showing, capturing the pratfalls of young love and womanhood with its heart on its sleeve in hopes that others might learn from her mistakes and cautionary tales. While her LP is undeniably compelling and well-put-together, what excited me more was “God Take Me Out of LA,” a one-off single she dropped toward the end of last year with a full country tilt. That song was backed with a full-band re-recording of “Lena Grove,” which, when taken together, seemed to promise an expansive and open future for the project. 

Today, McLamb has released “Quitting,” a bubbly three-minute ode to peer pressure, indulgence, and nicotine. Heralded by a cute TikTok, McLamb’s latest track is a song about quitting smoking and how easy it is until you find yourself next to a cute girl with a cigarette. “Quitting's so easy / I've done it a million times,” she boasts over a sunny open-road instrumental. The whole thing strikes me as very Sheryl Crow-esque as McLamb conflates the good and bad things pulling her in different directions. Later on in the song, she get to the real of it, singing “Quitting’s so easy / quitting you, that’s hard.”

Wednesday – “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)”

Dead Oceans

Wednesday don’t need much introduction. After honing their country-meets-shoegaze sound for a few EPs, deleted albums, and side projects, the Asheville group released my favorite record of the last ten years in Twin Plagues. After a covers album and a high-profile fifth LP, the group earned a rightful place as one of the most exciting, personable, and distinctly southern acts in modern indie rock. One month ago, the band treated us to “Elderberry Wine,” a full-out country song with a sticky chorus and terrific tavern-set music video. Now they’ve unleashed “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On),” a Classic Wednesday Song if I’ve ever heard one. 

The lyrics contain a good number of the iconic Wednesday signposts in a way that feels more comforting than redundant. There are mentions of highways, piss, and shitty fortified wine–mere earthly observations to distract from the ever-present dread that shoots through everything else. Halfway through the song, after all this scene-setting and a killer chorus, the band throws to a towering Twin Plagues-ass riff, a brief reminder that they know how to bowl you over and rip your guts out when they’re not giving you country sweetness. The music video is effortlessly cool, featuring bandleader Karly Hartzman bumming around rural North Carolina in jorts, a bikini top, and an edgy middle school skull sweatshirt. As the camera passes by churches, abandoned homes, and imposingly tall elevated highways, the natural greenery offers a tender counterpoint. When things get heavy, we see the full band through a hellish blood-red filter, searing and demented, before looping us back into the chorus. After one final holler from Hartzman, the band careens back into the riff and drops us off on the other side like a smack on the ass at the back of a dream.