Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman announces an 8-date solo tour across the southeastern US this December. See the full list of dates
Karly Hartzman is closing out a relentless year on her own terms. The Wednesday founder and frontwoman has announced an eight-date solo tour threading through the southeastern US, a brief December run that opens Dec. 1 at The Burl in Lexington, Kentucky, and winds down Dec. 11 at Lily’s Snack Bar in Boone, North Carolina. The timing is pointed: the jaunt begins less than two weeks after Wednesday and Mannequin Pussy wrap their co-headlining Bitch Cabal Tour, meaning Hartzman is trading one stage for another with barely a breath in between.
A Victory Lap That Doubles as a Breather
For an artist whose project began as a bedroom solo endeavor in 2017 before swelling into one of indie rock’s most acclaimed working bands, the solo framing is less a pivot than a homecoming. These are small rooms by design: Songbirds in Chattanooga, Boxcar in Opelika, Alabama, Fat Cat in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the storied 40 Watt in Athens, Georgia, and a hometown stop at The Pyrle in Greensboro, North Carolina. There is also a festival slot at Memphis’s Raised by Sound. The routing favors intimacy over scale, the kind of club circuit that made Wednesday’s name before the mountains of western North Carolina started echoing far beyond their borders.
The run caps a year in which Hartzman has been, by her own admission, everywhere. Wednesday have spent 2026 “touring our asses off,” as she put it this spring, carrying their sixth album, Bleeds, from a packed Coachella debut through a summer opening for Tyler Childers. Along the way she has surfaced in the margins too, guesting on a Weezer track, spinning on NTS Radio, and joining Hayley Williams’ set at Newport Folk Fest. For someone who treats her own voice as a work in permanent progress, reaching for notes she admits she cannot always hit, the solo dates read like another experiment, another way to keep archiving the trying.
‘Bleeds,’ a Deluxe Reissue, and What Comes Next
The tour also extends the long tail of Bleeds, the 2025 record widely regarded as the band’s finest and most fully realized, a patchwork of literary allusion, outlaw grit and Southern-gothic noise that Hartzman framed as the spiritual successor to 2023’s Rat Saw God. Last month the band fed that album’s afterlife with a deluxe edition, padding it out with previously unheard demos and remixes from collaborators including Animal Collective’s Avey Tare and cult favorite DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. It is a fitting coda for a record built on texture and accumulation.
Bleeds arrived from a place of real rupture. Hartzman wrote much of it as her romantic relationship with Wednesday guitarist MJ Lenderman ended while the band was on tour in Tokyo, and the album’s confessional specificity owes something to that fracture. “If you can describe the feeling, then you’re seeing it from a distance,” she told SPIN, a line that doubles as a thesis for her entire approach to songwriting. Lenderman, for his part, has been busy with his own acclaimed solo career, turning the band’s orbit into a web of overlapping solo ventures.
What the solo shows will not preview, at least not officially, is a Hartzman solo album, since no record is attached to this run. Instead it functions as a palate cleanser before the next chapter, with Wednesday already booked to play Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival in April 2027. For now the appeal is simpler and smaller: Karly Hartzman, a guitar, and a string of southern clubs, closing a huge year in the most human-scaled way she can. Tickets and the full itinerary are available through the band’s channels. Catch her while the rooms are still this size.
