MJ Lenderman Keeps It Raw

On a steamy afternoon in the middle of June, I met the twenty-five-year-old singer and guitarist MJ Lenderman for beers at Old Town Bar, a dim and unfussy Manhattan tavern that’s been in more or less continuous operation since 1892. Though Old Town is revered for its turn-of-the-century atmosphere—the fifty-foot mahogany bar, the rickety dumbwaiter ferrying hot frankfurters from kitchen to dining room, the majestic bank of porcelain urinals that Pete Wells, a longtime restaurant critic for the Times, once described as “so grand they turn the act of urinating into something sacramental”—it has largely escaped the type of broad canonization that attracts throngs of tourists. Instead, it remains the sort of joint where a person can stagger in, swig a whiskey, grouse to the barkeep, and reëmerge onto the street thirty minutes later, dizzy but cleansed. (The bar’s most public-facing moment was in 1992, when the rap trio House of Pain filmed the video for its single “Jump Around” in the dining room—the d.j. scratched from the men’s toilet.) Lenderman and I grabbed a high-backed wooden booth.

This month, Lenderman will release “Manning Fireworks,” his fifth album in five years. He is often described—accurately—as the next great hope for indie rock, or however one might now refer to scrappy, dissonant, guitar-based music that’s unconcerned, both sonically and spiritually, with whatever is steering the Zeitgeist. “Manning Fireworks” could have been released in 1975, or 1994, or 2003, but that is not to say it’s deliberately nostalgic; Lenderman is simply making the kind of warm and astringent rock and roll that has felt untethered from time since 1968, when Neil Young released his self-titled début.

In conversation, Lenderman is low-key, affable, and bright. He’s tall and lanky, with a halo of messy brown hair, and often dresses in a T-shirt and jeans. We ordered a round and began discussing the unsung art of assembling a tour rider, the list of faintly desperate culinary requests submitted to a venue in advance of a show. “There’s gonna be a hummus plate on there—that’ll happen,” Lenderman said, laughing. “I don’t think you even have to ask for that. We usually get a box of leafy greens—I’ll do fistfuls. We had this idea recently that we were gonna start asking for a rotisserie chicken.” An inspired choice, I offered—high-protein, cheap, easy to cram into a mini-fridge. He shook his head. A mistake. “Apparently, they shop for the rider the night before, so we’re looking at day-old.”

Lenderman was born in Asheville, North Carolina, an arty and historic town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and he’s lived there for most of his life. (“Manning Fireworks” was recorded in Asheville, at Drop of Sun Studios.) He started learning the guitar when he was about seven or eight, but music has always been omnipresent in his life: his father played the guitar, his mother the clarinet, and his three sisters sang. Lenderman’s paternal great-grandfather was the jazz musician and bandleader Charlie Ventura, whom DownBeat magazine declared the best tenor saxophonist of 1945. “He played with Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich. He was decently famous in the bebop world,” Lenderman said. In 1949, Ventura briefly hired a young Charlie Parker to play alto sax in his band. A concert listing in this magazine attempted to capture the fury of their sound, at the jazz club Royal Roost: “Here you’ll find lovers of bebop trembling like aspen leaves as they listen to Billy Eckstine and the bands of Charlie Ventura and Charlie Parker, who perform in a milieu that suggests the sprint hour at the six-day bike races.” Lenderman isn’t much of a bebop guy (“I don’t really listen to it—I haven’t tried,” he said), and his guitar playing suggests more of a long, downhill coast, no hands. But there’s a through line of wildness in both discographies. I told Lenderman that I responded in an instinctive way to the laxness of his work, so anomalous in an era in which technology makes it easy to defang, neuter, smooth. “I definitely think about that,” Lenderman said. “A lot of the stuff that has really resonated with me throughout my life is that way. I’ve just always liked that sound. It feels real to me.”

Lenderman self-released his first album, in 2019, when he was twenty years old and scooping ice cream at a shop in Asheville. “I quit, expecting to probably have to figure something else out, but then I just kept touring, and for the most part I haven’t had to work since,” he said. In 2022, Lenderman released the rowdy and sardonic album “Boat Songs.” On “You Have Bought Yourself a Boat,” he skewers upward mobility, briefly affecting a kind of seething Gen X disdain:

It’s plain to me to see

You have bought yourself a boat

Since the last time you and me spoke

Your laundry looks so pretty.

On “Hangover Game,” another highlight from “Boat Songs,” Lenderman sings about Michael Jordan’s performance with the Chicago Bulls in Game Five of the 1997 N.B.A. Finals, during which Jordan was reportedly suffering from food poisoning brought on by a gnarly late-night pizza. (“This was a heroic effort, one to add to the collection of efforts that make up his legend,” Phil Jackson, the Bulls’ coach, later said of the incident.) Through the years, rumors have circulated regarding Jordan’s behavior the night before the game: Was he, in fact, partying at Robert Redford’s chalet in the mountains of Utah? Had he flown on a private jet to Las Vegas to gamble? Over squealing guitar, Lenderman offers his take (“Remember that I am no detective,” he said at the time):

He looked so sick

It was all over the news

But it wasn’t the pizza

And it wasn’t the flu

Yeah, I love drinking, too.

“Boat Songs” brought Lenderman renown, landing on best-of-the-year lists at Pitchfork and Rolling Stone. In 2023, Lenderman signed to ANTI- Records and put out a live album, “And the Wind (Live and Loose!),” culled from two club shows he’d played that summer. Live albums are not as common as they once were (about fifty were released in 2023, compared with something like a hundred and forty-five in 1989), and they’re even more unusual to see from younger, non-legacy artists. Yet it felt right to capture the squall. “When ‘Boat Songs’ was made, I was, like, ‘I’m really buttoned up here!’ ” he said. Spontaneity—a lighthearted kind of recklessness—feels crucial to Lenderman’s vision. I asked him if it is possible to write that looseness into his work, or if it simply has to emerge in the performance. “Every time I sit down to write, it’s like starting from scratch again,” he said. “I have journals full of all sorts of disconnected stuff. I’ll fall out of phase with it sometimes, but I try to write every day. The hardest part is revisiting it and having to interact with my own bullshit.” He paused. “Sometimes I surprise myself.”

Many of the songs on “Manning Fireworks” feature a narrator in the throes of a dire existential or emotional crisis—a series of rock bottoms. I wondered if Lenderman was especially drawn to the rhetorical potential (or at least the grim humor) of moments in which it appears as though things simply cannot get worse. When the stakes are that low, everything is possible. (“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” as Janis Joplin famously sang.) Lenderman’s antiheroes are bored, dissatisfied, self-aware, and down bad. “I think it’s funny when people are put in a real situation, exposing them to who they really are,” he said. “A lot of the books I like to read—Harry Crews, Larry Brown—deal with the same stuff.” On the song “Joker Lips,” over guitar and mellotron, he sings,

Please don’t ask how I’m doing

Draining cum from hotel showers

Hoping for the hours

To pass a little faster.

Lenderman’s wry lyrics and arch delivery recall both the Kentucky musician Will Oldham and the poet and songwriter David Berman, two titans of nineties indie rock—each signed to the label Drag City—who perfected a deadpan tenderness. “Will Oldham’s music blew open some doors for me. Certain things he’d sing shocked me,” Lenderman said. “I was, like, ‘You can do that? It doesn’t have to be so serious?’ Those two, in particular, really opened me up to how important words can be in songs.”

In Lenderman’s lyrics, humor and pathos are inextricably linked: “We sat under a half-mast McDonald’s flag,” he recalls on “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In,” a breakup song that’s equal parts devastating and droll. The line always kills me. Lenderman is hyperaware of the ways in which the modern American landscape can feel absurd, especially to a person whose heart is open. Still, the album is not without moments of earnestness and sorrow, and several songs on “Manning Fireworks” suggest the excruciating dissolution of a relationship. On “Bark at the Moon,” a ten-minute, droning lament that closes the album, Lenderman’s nasal, crackling voice sounds especially yearning: “SOS / I took off on a bender / You took off on a jet.” He lets out an “Awooo!” that suggests Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London,” a canny reference in a song that already shares a title with an Ozzy Osbourne track about werewolves. (“That was a little joke,” Lenderman said.)

Recently, Lenderman and his then girlfriend, the musician Karly Hartzman, moved together to Greensboro, a couple of hours northeast of Asheville. “I guess I should mention me and Karly broke up,” Lenderman said. “We moved to Greensboro together, still, after that happened. We already had the plan,” he said, shrugging. “I’m gonna move out pretty soon, but I’ll probably stay close to that area, maybe more toward Durham.” Lenderman and Hartzman are both members of Wednesday, a burly and vulnerable ensemble that Pitchfork once called “one of the best indie-rock bands around.” The group’s most recent album, “Rat Saw God,” is both feral and perceptive. Hartzman’s lyrics remind me of the Mississippi novelist Barry Hannah’s writing; Hartzman’s, too, is granular and true, awake to the goriness of life in a small Southern town. (Musically, Wednesday falls somewhere between the country rumbling of the Drive-By Truckers and the melodic squeal of early Dinosaur Jr.) Hartzman started the group, but Lenderman has been a member since 2019. The breakup was amicable, as far as these things go. “I’m still in the band,” Lenderman said. When I asked if working together had been a sizable stress on their relationship, he thought about it for a moment. “We experienced a lot of stuff together that nobody else can understand. My bandmates have partners at home, and that causes its own tensions.”