Indie Rock’s New Personality Cults

The great musical mystery of the year, for me at least, has been all the hype around a 25-year-old singer-songwriter named MJ Lenderman. He is “often described—accurately—as the next great hope for indie rock,” The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich wrote recently. I like Lenderman, but his pleasant, country-inflected new album, Manning Fireworks, certainly doesn’t scream next anything. It almost could have been released in 1975, or 1994, or 2003.

Petrusich’s article made something click for me, though. She defined indie rock as “however one might now refer to scrappy, dissonant, guitar-based music that’s unconcerned, both sonically and spiritually, with whatever is steering the Zeitgeist.” She then said Manning Fireworks “could have been released in 1975, or 1994, or 2003” … but in a good way.

Such is the manner in which Lenderman has generally been praised: as a restorer, a throwback, a reassuring archetype. The North Carolina native plays guitar and sings backup in the genre-bending band Wednesday, but his solo music—laid-back, witty, tuneful while noisy—seems designed to trigger déjà vu. He fits in a clear lineage stretching back through mysterious slackers such as Mac DeMarco, Pavement, and R.E.M. to the Boomer goddaddies of wry disaffection: Neil Young, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground. In a glowing review of Lenderman’s new album, the critic Steven Hyden wrote, “As a young, curly-haired brunet dude, he made exactly the kind of music you would expect from a young, curly-haired brunet dude.” Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers told Rolling Stone, “He checks all the boxes for me.”

This is going to sound earnest in that intolerably Millennial way, but: Isn’t box-checking not very indie? When I first dabbled in hipsterdom, in the early 2000s, Wilco was defacing folk guitars with electronic chaos, Animal Collective was inventing barbershop psychedelia, and Joanna Newsom was writing supernatural symphonies on her harp. What united these artists wasn’t commercial independence—some were on major labels—but rather their belief that authenticity arose from experimentation. Whereas normie genres such as country and mainstream rock seemed to be chasing faded glory, acclaimed indie acts honored their influences by pushing their ideas further: Think of Sonic Youth intensifying John Cale’s drones to screeching frequencies, Modest Mouse’s yelpy profundity emerging from the Pixies’ yelpy absurdity, and so on.

For more than a decade now, though, that sense of forward movement has been harder to detect—because it’s not been quite as rewarded as it once was. When Spotify came to America in 2011, it decimated the profitability of recordings and overwhelmed the public with choice. It also empowered listeners in ways that eroded the importance of music critics, record stores, and real-life scenes. Tidy narratives of progress—always somewhat fictive, useful to journalists and publicists more than to consumers and artists—started to degrade. Prestige, based on a few pundits’ idea of boundary-pushing genius, stopped paying the bills like it once did (because people stopped shelling out for buzzy music without hearing it first). Die-hard fandom became crucial (the trendy phrase for this is parasocial relationship). This confluence of factors influenced indie rock much as it influenced the mainstream: by making identity more important.

The most discussed indie-rockers of the past decade were thus singer-songwriters with strong points of view, such as Mitski, Waxahatchee, Soccer Mommy, and Bartees Strange. The breakout bands tended to be glorified solo projects (Japanese Breakfast, Tame Impala, the War on Drugs) or, in the case of Haim, a sisterly trio ripe for stanning. As the media caught up to the internet’s amplification of long-marginalized voices, issues of race, gender, and sexuality became more explicit in the critical conversation. All of these new stars were serious talents, and all of them did, in various small ways, innovate; the layered and whispery vocal style of Phoebe Bridgers, for example, has proved influential. But in general, the progression of indie in the streaming era can be tracked less through sound than through the question of who’s singing and what they’re singing about.

Of course, indie rock—like any musical tradition—has always been rooted in questions of identity. It’s just that in the past, the default identity tended to be a white guy who’s only comfortable revealing himself through cryptic poetry, buried under aural distortion. Stephen Malkmus and Jeff Tweedy absolutely wrote about their own maleness, but most listeners and critics didn’t focus on that. Now, when identity has moved from cultural subtext to text—and indie rock has come to seem more like a settled language of self-expression than an unruly journey into the unknown—the next big thing seems oddly familiar: a man, in a once-male-dominated genre, singing about being a man.

The cover of Lenderman’s 2021 album, Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, features a photo of a naked guy holding a cat, framed by happy-faced stars and moons. It was a fitting statement of winsome, self-exposing masculinity—of a bro who knows he’s babygirl.

Stylistically, the cover also conveyed his musical approach: concise, funny, building layers of meaning through simple juxtapositions. Much of Lenderman’s early work made him out to be a lo-fi magpie, pairing wonky riffs with understated punch lines delivered in a flat, vaguely fearful drawl. On Guitar Solo’s “I Ate Too Much at the Fair,” Lenderman encapsulated an entire relationship—who cares for whom, who spends and who saves—in one couplet: “I ate too much at the fair / Despite what you said.” Gobs of reverb, with sweetness at the edges, conveyed his lovelorn bloat.

That album and his breakthrough follow-up, 2022’s Boat Songs, felt rooted in what you might call the “woke first person,” situating individual desires with an anxious nod to the society around him. In one song, he fantasized about becoming a Catholic priest so he wouldn’t have to worry about girls anymore. Another, the rollicking “Hangover Game,” used an anecdote about Michael Jordan to probe his own drinking habit. I always laugh at “Inappropriate,” whose noodling organ sounds like the Doors being recorded from the other side of a wall:

Accidentally saw your mother
Sleepin’
She looked so peaceful and disgusting

It felt inappropriate
To catch her like that
I never want to see her sleep again

Manning Fireworks, his new album, shifts the perspective a bit: He now often seems to be singing about other guys. Lenderman told The New York Times that some of the album’s lyrics were inspired by misogynistic podcasters such as Andrew Tate, who preach an alpha, acquisitive view of how men should behave. The album is at its best when it links sorrow and pigheadedness, suggesting that the contemporary Problem With Men has something to do with the heartbreak and impotence that rockers like Lenderman have long plumbed (he sings tenderly of one character “punching holes in the hotel room”). At times, though, Lenderman is as predictable as a political cartoonist, employing glib ironies to mock smartwatches and guys who rent Ferraris after a breakup.

These themes are modern—listen closely, and the album actually couldn’t have come out in 1975, 1994, or 2003—but the album’s sound is not. Lenderman is now making blast-at-a-barbecue Americana, bedecked in pedal steel and tragic-hero guitar solos. Some elements hit the ear as unexpected: doomy riffing in “Wristwatch,” drifting clarinet in “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In,” the rumbling uplift of “On My Knees.” Yet fundamentally, the album feels unmoored, assembled through reference points. Although the music scans as the work of a full band, it makes sense that Lenderman played most of the instruments: This is one rock geek’s modest vision, unimpeded. Lenderman’s skills aren’t debatable, and when I watch videos of him performing with his heavy-lidded eyes and boyish smirk, I get why people are obsessed. But if this is the next great hope for indie rock, then indie rock is becoming a costume closet.

Luckily, other contenders exist for that title, and one of them is Lenderman’s own band, Wednesday, a quintet founded in 2017. When I first listened to the group’s 2023 album, Rat Saw God, I felt a rush of recognition—not for any particular sound, but for the way Wednesday took for granted that its job was to break ground. The songs blended noise-rock and country into gnarled, surprising shapes. The lead singer Karly Hartzman—Lenderman’s now-ex-girlfriend—told tales of small-town life through sweet warbles and harsh screams. All five of the band members at the time were credited as songwriters, and all of the album’s songs seemed like they could have arisen only through a collision of creative minds.

Wednesday is part of a fascinating trend sweeping through Gen Z rock: a revival of shoegaze. The subgenre originated in the late ’80s as bands such as My Bloody Valentine blanketed concert venues in slow-churning guitar squall while staring down at their effects pedals. The new incarnation—check out the fearsome young trio Julie—draws not just from traditional shoegazers but also from heavy metal, emo, and even electronica. The trend can probably be attributed to TikTok’s demand for sounds that make banal images seem profound. But another reason might be a latent hunger for rock that’s abstracted, collaborative, and sensation-first. Shoegaze is, after all, a term for subsuming individual personalities into pure sound.

[Read: How indie rock changed the world]

Even outside of that fad, to my ear, many of the most exciting things happening in 2020s indie are bands. Recent consensus-masterwork albums have come from Dry Cleaning and Wet Leg, whose spoken-sung vocals enmesh with spry, unpredictable post-punk; Turnstile, a hard-core act that veers into dance music and power pop; and Big Thief, whose ornate folk jams radiate sci-fi eeriness. The state of the music industry—especially after the dangers and disruptions of COVID-19—is broadly discouraging of bands: Groups are just more expensive and harder to market than solitary figures. But if indie rock means anything, it means trying to carve out a refuge from the forces shaping the mainstream.

And make no mistake: If indie mostly defines itself around solo stars, pop will devour its last shred of differentiation. The streaming years have seen tremendous evolution in the sound of mass-market music, in part because identity-based imperatives have pushed the world’s biggest entertainers to act more underground. Inspired by the alt-mainstream bridge-builder Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift and her protégés have started to employ indie-rock producers to furnish them with classic signifiers of authenticity. Listening to recent pop is like playing record-snob bingo, trying to identify the musical touchstones used to illustrate the singer’s confessional zingers. Much the same thing can be said of Manning Fireworks—and it’s likely no coincidence that Lenderman is getting memed in the same manner as a pop girlie.

Time for a confession that will make me sound like a parasocial hypocrite: I’m worried about Lenderman’s breakup. He and Hartzman were dating for years, and many of their songs chronicle their love. But they split recently (and—here’s more lore—moved out of the Asheville property where they and some other cool musicians lived). The breakup is apparently amicable: Lenderman is still in Wednesday, and the two just performed together on The Tonight Show. Still, with all the fame building around his solo career, it’s natural to wonder about the band’s fate. Speaking about Wednesday’s future, Hartzman recently told Rolling Stone, “There has to be a lot of change.” That’s scary as a fan—but then again, change is what a fan of music like this should want.