Back in late February, less than six months after MJ Lenderman released Manning Fireworks, his 2024 deadpan-sophisticate ringer of a breakthrough album, he told me that maybe it was time for his tour to end.
“I don’t know,” he said, standing backstage at a small sold-out theater in Boulder, Colorado, when the winter snow was still accreting. “But I think enough people have already seen us.”
Three months later, in the brutalizing May heat of Charleston, South Carolina, Lenderman indeed looked tired. He and his alternating band of longtime friends, the Wind, had just returned from Australia and New Zealand; then they’d powered down the East Coast, playing sold-out stands in DC and New York along the way. He’d spent one day in his little rental in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, then driven south in the minivan his dad had given him, a white Toyota so old its bumper stickers were cracking like damaged skin. In a week, they were bound for Europe. But before he left, he covered Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” with his hero, Patterson Hood, beneath a sprawl of twisted live oaks, and told me later it had at least been fun.
And then, after three more months, Lenderman returned to Colorado, playing a room that could hold nearly 4,000 people. In three days, Manning Fireworks would turn one. He looked happy and loose, maybe even glowing. This was the first night of a two-week tour, and a few members of the Wind had gotten substitutes so they could spend time with dogs back home or get ready to tour with Wednesday, the sister band of sorts to the Wind that Lenderman left as a touring member after he split with founder Karly Hartzman last year. They still share several players.
This new crew turned do-re-mi into a dizzying round of vocal warm-ups, did breathing exercises together, and then clapped in busy patterns. “I don’t know the last time I saw my parents,” Lenderman told me as we walked to the stage a few minutes later, the crowd starting to roar. “But I am feeling pretty good right now. Everyone seems…okay?”
During the course of 2025, Lenderman emerged as a sort of new model for the modern slacker-rock king—a very nice 26-year-old in band T-shirts with a cutting sense of humor softened by a preternaturally casual delivery and enough decency and care to not turn his and Hartzman’s aforementioned breakup into some gossipy row. Yes, Jackass is funny, like the Earth is round, but that doesn’t mean he must be one.
“I’m just always surprised that there’s still more people to come to shows,” he says. “Like, where are all these people coming from?” He admits that GQ Men of the Year laurels were the exact kind of thing that would have given him pause only months earlier: “Sometimes I am wondering if I’ve made a huge mistake—not in regards to playing music, but maybe something like this. What’s it going to do to me mentally in the long run? But everybody I talked to said it would be cool and not embarrassing.”
There are a few reasons Lenderman is able to relax a little more these days. Not long after he played the Newport Folk Festival in July, he came home for two days and wrote an as-yet-untitled song that he soon started playing with the Wind. It hinges on a line he really likes, written with a few friends: “It wasn’t love / You were just dumb enough to call me an angel.”
“I wasn’t even interested in writing for a while, but doing it makes me feel better. There’s no extra voices in my head, making me feel insecure,” he says, adding that he also briefly toyed with a Jesse Welles pastiche of a song about Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation, just for kicks. “It always sounds so simple when I do it, when that headspace opens up. But getting there is pretty tough sometimes.”
In mid-September, Wednesday released Bleeds, one of this year’s most affecting rock albums. Lenderman and Hartzman recorded it with the band just after they broke up, without really telling anyone else at the sessions about the state of their long relationship. With the album finally out there, the weight of expectation about how people might perceive those fraught songs has lifted.
“Outside of my reality, there’s one outside of me, the way people are going to talk about me, good or bad. I’ve just accepted that,” he says. “It could really bother me in the past, if somebody said something about me that was factually incorrect. But I like my friends, and I know what’s what. I don’t really care anymore.”
Early in 2025, Lenderman and the Wind were scheduled to play two sold-out shows at Cat’s Cradle, the fabled North Carolina indie-rock institution just a few miles from the place he rents these days. But he’d been back in the mountains, visiting his family. As he and one of his three sisters, Olivia, drove the three hours east in his old minivan, every light on the dashboard started flashing. He wheeled into a Meineke, where a mechanic told him he needed a new battery. He couldn’t make the fix because of a busted pipe Lenderman had ignored for months.
They found an ad hoc solution that would at least get him to the show, then the mechanic told him to get back to a shop immediately. He, of course, did not. “I stopped at a gas station, and smoke was just pouring out of the hood,” he says, chuckling. “I made it back to my house, got it towed to the mechanic, and they just said, ‘We can’t do anything about this.’ ”
In late September, Lenderman finally went to a dealership and leased a black Toyota Tacoma. It’s a sign that he plans to spend more time at home next year, writing and recording and considering what comes next. Of course, as he tells me this, he’s been off the road one week, and he’ll be back onstage in another week. He’s calling from an Airbnb in Atlanta; his partner, Rachel Brown, is on tour with their band, Water From Your Eyes, and Lenderman is spending a few days in the van with them. He laughs when I ask if, a year after Manning Fireworks, he’s simply addicted to being in motion.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve had a decent break. Early on, when I’d get back to my house after I first moved in, I’d freak out a little bit. I would start to see what my life looks like, maybe understand it,” he says. “But I have definitely started to feel more at ease.”
Grayson Haver Currin is a frequent GQ contributor. His profile of MJ Lenderman was published in February.
A version of this story originally appeared in the December 2025/January 2026 issue of GQ with the title “MJ Lenderman: Rock & Roller of the Year”.
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Tyrell Hampton
Styled by George Cortina
Grooming by Kim Verbeck
Tailoring by Yelena Travkina
Set design by Heath Mattioli
Produced by Camp Productions