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WHAT IS SECRETLY SOCIETY?

Secretly Society is our spin on a classic idea - the record club. The pitch is simple. One record, in an exclusive, Secretly Society vinyl color, shipped to your door every month. Oh yeah, and shipping is included. find out more.

Members Only Deals

Secretly Society members gain access to these limited-edition items with free shipping on all items with your subscription. Guest list access (subject to availability). Plus early access to limited items and sales.


 

April 2023 Secretly Society Album

Rat Saw God (Society Exclusive)

Wednesday
Label: Dead Oceans

Released on April 7th. Wednesday 'Rat Saw God' Secretly Society Exclusive on Clear Green-Eyed Vinyl.

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 neighborhood 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. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything.

Rat Saw God was written in the months immediately following Twin Plagues’ completion, and recorded in a week at Asheville’s Drop of Sun studio. While Twin Plagues was a breakthrough release critically for Wednesday, it was also a creative and personal breakthrough for Hartzman. The lauded record charts feeling really fucked up, trauma, dropping acid. It had Hartzman thinking about the listener, about her mom hearing those songs, about how it feels to really spill your guts. And in the end, it felt okay. “I really jumped that hurdle with Twin Plagues where I was not worrying at all really about being vulnerable – I was finally comfortable with it, and I really wanna stay in that zone.”

The album opener, “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” happens in a flash: an explosive and wailing wall-of-sound dissonance that’d sound at home on any ‘90s shoegaze album, then peters out into a chirping chorus of peepers, a nighttime sound. And then into the previously-released eight-and-half-minute sprawling, heavy single, “Bull Believer.” Other tracks, like the creeping “What’s So Funny” or “Turkey Vultures,” interrogate Hartzman’s interiority - intimate portraits of coping, of helplessness. “Chosen to Deserve” is a true-blue love song complete with ripping guitar riffs, skewing classic country. “Bath County” recounts a trip Hartzman and her partner took to Dollywood, and time spent in the actual Bath County, Virginia, where she wrote the song while visiting, sitting on a front porch. And Rat Saw God closer “TV in the Gas Pump” is a proper traveling road song, written from one long ongoing iPhone note Hartzman kept while in the van, its final moments of audio a wink toward Twin Plagues.

The reference-heavy stand-out “Quarry” is maybe the most obvious example of the way Hartzman seamlessly weaves together all these throughlines. It draws from imagery in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy; a collection of stories from Hartzman’s family (her dad burned down that cornfield); her current neighbors; and the West Virginia street from where her grandma lived, right next to a rock quarry, where the explosions would occasionally rock the neighborhood and everyone would just go on as normal.

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. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.
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May 2023 Secretly Society Album

Through and Through (Society Exclusive)

Baby Rose
Label: Secretly Canadian

Released on May 12th. Baby Rose 'Through and Through' Secretly Society Exclusive on Yellow & Black Opaque Vinyl.

Baby Rose makes healing music for the aimless and heartbroken. The Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter and producer’s uniquely rich voice naturally lends itself to her powerful, smoke-filled ballads lamenting lost loves and broken futures. “I make music to help myself get through things,” she says. The piercing honesty and vulnerability she brings to her lyrics in turn helps others process their feelings and find a place of healing. For Rose, it’s a journey that’s still ongoing. “If I’m going to leave anything behind, it’s going to be getting people back to themselves,” she says. “As I get back to myself, it’s a constant reset: Remember who you are, remember who you want to be.”

You can hear the impact of this approach in Baby Rose’s upcoming second album, Through and Through. Take the hypnotic “Fight Club.” Over the track’s simmering baseline and crashing cymbals, she declares, “I don’t need no one else to show me the way.” She describes the song as a “breaking of the shell. It encourages me to just go for it and not care about what anyone else thinks.” Therein lies Baby Rose’s strength: a determination to live, love, and create on her own terms. “I’m not just a singer with a unique voice,” she says. “I’m somebody that has something to say.”

Growing up in Washington DC, the artist born Jasmine Rose Wilson first realized the power of her voice by reading aloud original poems at family gatherings. Despite being bullied for her lower vocal register throughout her childhood and teen years, she ultimately found comfort in songwriting and singing while playing her piano, inspired by the likes of Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, and Janis Joplin—strong women who also possessed unique voices. She moved to Fayetteville, N.C for middle and high school.

In 2013, Rose moved to Atlanta for college and quickly became immersed in the city’s music scene and which also nourished the gift inside of her. With the release of her seminal projects, From Dusk Til Dawn and To Myself, Rose earned early co-signs from SZA, J. Cole, James Blake, Kehlani, and LeBron James to name a few. Her explosive To Myself project saw Rose channeling immense grief into a body of work that revealed her gift for soul-baring and universally relatable songwriting. The project received large critical acclaim from The New York Times, Pitchfork, Vogue, NPR, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Complex, Harper’s Bazaar, ELLE and many more. Rose’s meteoric rise birthed a one-of-a-kind, stirring NPR Tiny Desk performance, a sold-out headlining worldwide tour and major placements on HBO’s ‘Insecure’ and Kenya Barris’ award-winning ‘Grownish’. In late 2020, Baby Rose made her late night TV debut with an arresting performance of her breakout song “Show You” on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Additionally, Rose was featured on Cole’s Dreamville compilation, Revenge of the Dreamers III (“Self-Love”), after finding her way into a studio, sitting at the piano, and grabbing the attention of J. Cole by writing and producing records for the album. “I just felt, after living in Fayetteville, NC as well for so long, I deserved to be there,” she says.

In the years since releasing To Myself, Rose has been painstakingly piecing together its sequel. Started almost immediately after its release, her new body of work finds her in a state of musical and personal transition. It’s a subtle merging of new sounds—stirring rock, upbeat r&b, psychedelic funk, pop, and soulful ballads—, all mastered through analog tape to make the music feel warmer and all-encompassing. It’s also a journey inward as she battles past fear and self-doubt to finally discover—and love—who she is, where she is. Finishing an album with such peace and firm resolution is a first for Rose, but she makes it clear: She’s nowhere near done writing her story.

“I think as long as I’m being raw and trying to push past my comfort zone, it will feel rewarding,” she says. “I don’t want to be the type that doesn’t take risks because I’m afraid. I have to trust that as long as the music is honest and innovative, it'll be timeless."
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Members Only

Secretly Society members gain access to these limited-edition items…and many more


WHAT IS SECRETLY SOCIETY?

The record club reinvented

Secretly Society is our spin on a classic idea - the record club. The pitch is simple. One record, in an exclusive, Secretly Society vinyl color, shipped to your door every month. Oh yeah, and shipping is included.

IS IT REALLY THAT SIMPLE?

Yes. Yes it is.

WHAT RECORDS WILL I GET?

Expect a mix of new artists, established vets, and important represses from our extensive Secretly Group back catalog, featuring the best of Dead Oceans, Jagjaguwar, and Secretly Canadian. See the already-announced albums above!

WHAT IF I HATE THIS MONTH'S ALBUM?

Yikes! Hate seems a bit strong. We would recommend you at least give it another, fresh listen. If you are absolutely sure you'll hate it, that's totally fine. We offer an opportunity to "Skip" a month's album and go to the next one. You get 1 Skip every 6 months, so use it wisely. To use your Skip email us at society@secretlystore.com.

WHEN DO I GET MY RECORDS?

Great question. You receive your first album the month after you join, as soon as the calendar flips. So, no matter whether you sign up on September 1st or September 30th, the first record you receive will be in October. Shortly after subscriptions close on the 1st of the month, we begin shipping that month’s albums, and we'll usually be able to send out all Secretly Society shipments in the first full week of a given month. All of that adds up to US customers receiving their records in the second week of the month and international customers in the third or fourth week. We understand that the Secretly Society timeline doesn't always play nicely with album release dates, so feel free to hit us up with questions at society@secretlystore.com.

LET'S TALK MONEY.

Definitely. Here's how it works: you pay for the entire subscription up front, one time, shipping included. Cool, right? Then you have until your subscription ends to cancel your plan or it will auto-renew for another period. So, if you signed up for a 3 month subscription on August 15th, you have until November 15th to decline to renew your membership. Otherwise, we assume you're loving Secretly Society and want to continue.

OK, WHERE DO I SIGN UP?

You've come to the right place. Hit one of the orange buttons above to subscribe.

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