“Chosen To Deserve”, the latest offering of Wednesday’s third album “Rat Saw God”(also their first with Dead Oceans), is a love letter read out loud about the awkward, chaotic girlhood sets in the suburbia. The frontman Karly Hartzman reflects on her small town life — taking hard drugs with friends until one of them barely survived, hooking up in the back of an SUV, getting hammered until you piss outside the street — to a potential long-term lover in hopes she’d be accepted “for all her worst.” “To tellin’ you all my worst / Just so you know what you signed up for / What you’re dealin’ with / Just so you know what you’ve been chosen to deserve.”

Her recollection of rebellious adventures are bundled in like long text messages you’d receive from a friend at three in the morning, leaving you invested in the nostalgia of raw, unsupervised adolescence that you can vividly hear from Hartzman’s vocals — a highlight too compelling to be ignored. With a strapping yet simple four chords of country rock guitar to uplift the whole track further, Hartzman sinks deeper into the ugly and the bad that makes her who she is today. But when the maturity washes in, she doesn’t shy away from the acknowledgment that her life is different now. “Thank god I was the girl chosen to deserve you / I am the girl you were chosen to deserve,” she sings — almost like a prayer.

Watch the official music video here: