Over the past few years, the North Carolina natives have carved out their own distinct (and influential) lane in indie rock: Twin Plagues, the band’s 2021 breakthrough, introduced fans to their noisy hybrid of shoegaze and country, while 2023’s Rat Saw God helped kick off a new generation’s alt-country revival. Wednesday’s sixth album, Bleeds, hones their signature sound—often gnarly, occasionally sublime—with lyrics by bandleader Karly Hartzman that play out like contemporary Southern gothic short stories unfolding inside of dusty dives or along the banks of creeks in her hometown of Greensboro. Bleeds arrives in the wake of a pivotal time for the five-piece band (singer/guitarist Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, lap steel/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis, bassist/pianist Ethan Baechtold, and drummer Alan Miller): Hartzman wrote much of the album during a grueling world tour, in the midst of which she and Lenderman ended their six-year romantic relationship. But the songs of Bleeds are intimate in a different way entirely, built around strikingly detailed anecdotes picked up from conversations with friends or overheard bar wisdom. “Weeds grew into the springs of the trampoline/You saw a pit bull puppy pissing off a balcony,” Hartzman sings on “Wound Up Here by Holdin On,” jointly inspired by a line from a friend’s poem and a story about a body pulled out of a West Virginia creek. A rerecorded version of “Phish Pepsi,” first released on Hartzman and Lenderman’s 2021 collab EP Guttering, recounts a weird, stoned teenage memory (“We watched a Phish concert and Human Centipede/Two things I now wish I had never seen”). And their small-town transcendentalism is at its best on “Elderberry Wine”—the prettiest they’ve ever sounded, though not without its ennui.