MJ Lenderman & the Wind make their Austin City Limits debut on Tuesday, July 1, and the legendary music series is proud to announce this highly-anticipated performance will be livestreamed on the ACLTV YouTube Channel. ACL offers fans worldwide the unique opportunity to watch MJ Lenderman & the Wind’s taping live in its entirety from the famed Austin City Limits stage in Austin, Texas, on July 1 at 8pm CT/9pm ET free via the ACLTV YouTube Channel. ACL is thrilled to showcase the ascendant singer-songwriter and his five-piece band ahead of the 4th of July, lighting up the ACL stage with highlights from his acclaimed Manning Fireworks. Lenderman recently received a trio of 2025 nominations for the album from the Americana Music Awards, leading the pack with top honor nods for Album of the Year, Song of the Year and Emerging Artist of the Year. The livestream will begin promptly at 8pm CT and will only be available live. The broadcast episode will air this fall on PBS and stream on pbs.org/austincitylimits as part of the iconic television series’ upcoming Season 51.
26-year-old singer-songwriter-guitarist MJ Lenderman makes his ACL debut after a busy couple of years. A rock-and-roll and basketball obsessed kid growing up in the mountain town of Asheville, NC, he put out the breakthrough solo set Boat Songs in 2022; the sleeper hit piled offhanded, Southern-inflected rock on wry, laconic bangers like “Hangover Game,” “Six Flags” and “Tastes Just Like It Costs.” With its barbed little jokes, canny sports references, and gloriously ragged guitar solos, the album became one of that year’s standouts, a ramshackle set of charms and chuckles. He followed with a stellar 2024, bookended by a memorable feature on Waxahatchee’s “Right Back To It,” a magnetic duet about romantic doubt that became one of the year’s biggest indie-rock anthems, and the release of his own highly anticipated solo album, Manning Fireworks. A laser-sharp study of misfits and the mistakes they make, where sympathy and sardonicism share the same ragged rock song, the acclaimed release features thumbnail character studies: “She’s Leaving You,” a half-sneering portrait of a dad cheating his way through a midlife crisis, at least until he gets caught and blasts Clapton in a rented Ferrari en route to Vegas; “On My Knees” finds Lenderman wondering what it means to have fun in a world where so many people seem full of shit; and muses on edgelords and alpha males on the standout “Wristwatch.” Manning Fireworks topped many critics’ year-end best lists, with Rolling Stone raving, “MJ Lenderman delivers a sad-guy indie-rock gem” and named him “a budding guitar great and ace storyteller”; The New York Times calls Lenderman “A young artist with an old soul and a keen eye for observational detail that makes his canted portraits of small-town life come alive”; NPR raves, “He’s a homespun magical realist, always throwing in something off-kilter to elevate his tales of lovable losers”; and the Guardian concurs, “Far from being dude-centric, Manning Fireworks’ sad sack anthems tap into something devastatingly, purely human.”
