Lenderman makes rawer music than the modern studio experience typically supports. "It feels real to me," he said.
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.
Denne historien er fra September 09, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra September 09, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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MIRROR IMAGES
‘A Different Man” and The Substance.”
THE FOOTBALL BRO
Pat McAfee brings a casual new style to ESPN.
OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY
Proximity to wealth proves perilous in Rumaan Alam’ novel Entitlement.”
EYES WIDE SHUT
How Monet shared a private world.
WITH THE MOSTEST
The very rich hours of Pamela Harriman.
HUGO HAMILTON AUTOBAHN
On the Autobahn outside Frankfurt. November. The fields were covered in a thin sheet of snow.
TRY IT ON
How Law Roach reimagined red-carpet style.
SORRY I'M NOT YOUR CLOWN TODAY
Bowen Yang's trip to Oz, by way of conversion therapy and S..N.L.”
SNIFF TEST
A maverick perfumer tries to make his mark on a storied fashion house.
LET'S HAVE A LONG TALK ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP JUST BEFORE BED!
Babe, are you nodding off? I know we’re both exhausted after a long day, a dinner party at which you made a three-word comment that left me feeling like you don’t know me at all, and the subsequent ninety-minute fight that culminated in a tentative truce.