The guitarist who could make indie rock big again

What’s even rarer: There was enough demand for a fourth show, according to concert promoter the Bowery Presents—a sign that Lenderman is headed for bigger and better things in the music industry. There’s just one thing: He kinda likes where he’s at.

“I want to be financially stable, and I want to be able to make music—but I’m not really interested in getting bigger," the 25-year-old singer and guitarist says, tucked in a booth of the Manhattan restaurant Lafayette one evening this summer, nursing a Kronenbourg and wondering where he’ll watch the N.B.A. finals later that night.

In the world of indie rock, this is the year of MJ Lenderman: The Asheville, North Carolina singer-songwriter has helped propel two of indie rock’s recent success stories, Wednesday (of which he’s a member) and Waxahatchee. Now he’s causing a stir with his solo work, including his heavily anticipated fourth studio album “Manning Fireworks," which is out Sept. 6.

A guitar hero for a post-guitar-hero age, Lenderman has a loose, countrified sound that filters Gen-X touchstones like Neil Young, Sonic Youth and Drive-By Truckers through the brain of a Gen-Z kid who salvaged the greatest hits of his dad’s CD collection.

Rock critic Steven Hyden calls Lenderman’s 2023 live album “And the Wind (Live and Loose!)" his favorite record of the entire 2020s. There’s been so much fuss lately over the songwriter’s refreshing approach to slacker-rock, in fact, that he’s felt the need to get “totally off the Internet."

“Most everything I’ve seen about me is generally positive, but even that f— with me," says Lenderman, whose real name is Mark Jacob, though his friends call him Jake.

In a Mississippi Wreckers T-shirt (from the Mississippi Records store in Portland, Ore.), with his scraggly, shoulder-length hair recently chopped shorter, Lenderman seems even more boyish than he normally does. He just relocated from Asheville, with its thriving music scene, to Greensboro, North Carolina, a more populous city a couple of hours away. Unlike generations of aspiring musicians, from Jim Morrison to Chappell Roan, who’ve moved to Hollywood from smaller places for fame and fortune, Lenderman doesn’t want to leave his home state. Touring incessantly has made him appreciate North Carolina more.

“I never had any desire to go somewhere else," he says.

That hasn’t stopped his music from being everywhere. His 2022 album “Boat Songs" landed on many critics’ annual best-of lists. The music website Stereogum called Waxahatchee’s “Tigers Blood" the best record of the first half of 2024, singling out Lenderman’s “casually stunning" guitar solo on the standout cut, “Right Back to It." His guitar-playing with Wednesday helped make it “one of the best indie-rock bands around," per Pitchfork. That band’s 2023 album “Rat Saw God" was considered among last year’s best albums.

Lenderman writes clever, wry, sometimes poignant lyrics. A dab of existentialism opens the new album, for example (“birds against a heavy wind that wins in the end"). He has a soft spot for sports references (say, tackling Michael Jordan’s performance during the 1997 N.B.A. finals on the 2022 song “Hangover Game") and a droll sense of humor, which often entails quoting parts of older songs like “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door." (Lenderman admits he first heard “Heaven’s Door" played by Guns N’ Roses, not Bob Dylan.)

“Jake sort of represents this type of youthful integrity," says Katie Crutchfield, the Alabama singer-songwriter who records as Waxahatchee and first became familiar with Lenderman’s music in 2022. “He’s not trying to conjure up some kind of mythology about himself—it’s all really authentic. That’s rare in this moment where even the coolest or most talented artists are chronically online and overly self-aware."

The chatter about Lenderman presents an intriguing question: If you’re a charismatic guy who’s breaking out with a relatively traditional take on indie rock, at a time when indie rock is lower-profile and dominated by plaintive female singer-songwriters, just how big are you even able to get?

For acts in mainstream pop and hip-hop like Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and, before them, Olivia Rodrigo and Ice Spice, the sky’s the limit. Heart-baring male singer-songwriters who pair well with Swiftian artists like Rodrigo—Noah Kahan, say, or Zach Bryan—are also in fashion. But, in 2024, despite his talent and accolades, it could be challenging for Lenderman, an unassuming, social-media-avoiding musician who the TikTok community and the Gen-Z pop-culture account Pop Crave probably don’t care about, to become a household name.

Growing up in Asheville, Lenderman was the third child of four, surrounded by three sisters. He started playing guitar early, attended Drive-By Truckers shows with his dad and had a close-knit group of musically-inclined friends, including Karly Hartzman, the leader of Wednesday, whom he started dating. By his teens, he was putting out music under MJ Lenderman, eventually releasing albums while working in a local ice-cream shop.

It was 2022’s “Boat Songs," which he made for only $1,100 in an Asheville studio, that became his solo breakthrough, and led him to sign with ANTI-, an indie label where Katie Crutchfield’s twin sister Allison Crutchfield is an A&R executive.

He and Hartzman broke up in March but remain bandmates and, for now, housemates. Lenderman insists there aren’t tensions between his solo career and the better-known Wednesday, whether personal or professional. (He’s still in the band, after all.) The two acts have the same management and booking agent. Their successes have been mutually beneficial, he says, and having a solo outlet helps Lenderman be more of a team player in Wednesday. (He also credits his big family with teaching him to play well with others.) He and Hartzman don’t have any drama, he says.

“I’ve never felt competitive," Lenderman says. “We’re not like that with each other."

In fact, Hartzman contributes backing vocals on much of “Manning Fireworks," which contains nine tracks and features Lenderman on guitar, drums, bass and organ. The new songs, which evoke artists like Faces (“Joker Lips"), Drive-By Truckers (“Wristwatch") and Teenage Fanclub (“On My Knees"), are less noisy and more alt-country than “Boat Songs."

What’s unchanged is the core of Lenderman’s attack: memorable, hooky guitar motifs; affecting, melodramatic crescendos; quotidian, heartfelt images (“we sat under a half-mast McDonald’s flag"); and oddball references—a misquoted Quiet Riot lyric here, a nod to The Band there, a howl meant to allude to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London."

“It’s like this really fresh melting pot of reference points I love," Waxahatchee’s Crutchfield says, adding that Lenderman’s music “invigorated me a bit creatively."

This summer, he previewed a handful of tracks from “Manning Fireworks" at a listening event at Mercury Lounge on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Hearing just him and a guitar, instead of full instrumentation, put in relief the sturdiness of the melodies that anchor his songs. The audience was enthusiastic, but he still acted as if he was just a guy off the street taking up our time.

Write to Neil Shah at Neil.Shah@wsj.com