In an MJ Lenderman song, the extraordinary is always elbowing its way into the mundane. His 2022 breakthrough album, Boat Songs, thrived on these situations. One minute someone was clinically depressed on the Six Flags log flume, the next they were locked in a spat about a “dumb hat” outside a butcher shop. “Being really sad or upset while wearing a costume,” he told Pitchfork last year, “that’s funny.” Over the last couple of years—as he signed with Anti- and remained a guitarist and songwriter in the great Southern indie rock band Wednesday, alongside his now ex-partner Karly Hartzman—Lenderman became a cult folk hero for people willing to talk about their feelings if they could couch it in a joke about Jackass.

I had originally clocked Manning Fireworks as more of the same, where Lenderman relies on this one weird trick to write sincere but ultimately unserious songs. I was wrong. Lenderman has honed his songwriting such that I’d nominate a couplet for short story of the year: “Kahlúa shooter/DUI scooter.” He’s got lines that’ll paint a stupid grin on your face: “I could really use your two cents, babe/I could really use the change,” or, “Is it the quiet hiss of a midnight piss/Or a river turned to creek?” If his folk-rock forebears, like Neil Young and Jason Molina, were drawn to the mystics of the natural world, Lenderman is drawn to the mystics of the shitty apartment, simple and unvarnished songs born of small screens in small rooms in small towns.

His writing style conjures the dark, dry wit of Warren Zevon. The men who populate Lenderman and Zevon’s songs are pure losers, divorcés, badgering or self-effacing romantics working on their last-ever heartbreak. Both artists also know how to open a song with a zinger: “Well I can saw a woman in two/But you won’t wanna look in the box when I am through,” Zevon once sang. It’s such a Lenderman line, especially if you imagine him singing it at half the speed Zevon does. “Burdened by those wet dreams/Of people having fun,” opens Lenderman, staring into the middle distance on the mid-tempo rocker “On My Knees.” This is, mind you, the second time he’s sung about cum on Manning Fireworks.

Really, it’s unfair to say that Lenderman writes about cum and piss and cartoons and video games. He does, but it’s the style and economy in which he renders them, as if he’s brushing them in gold leaf. “Rudolph” opens with this:

Rudolph waking up in the road
Dew dripping off his red nose
Blue and black, tire track
Torn through a beautiful doe
Deleted scene of Lightning McQueen
Blacked out at full speed

This alone might cast him as the Will Hunting of indie rock, a secret classicist with the pen where you wonder what would happen if he actually applied himself and wrote about, you know, the moon or something. But Lenderman uses this goofy, carefully written scene to tee up real feelings of desire, the same way playing Ozzy Osbourne’s “Bark at the Moon” on Guitar Hero is deployed as a pitiful admission of unworldliness to someone he loves who is “in on my bit” and “sick of the schtick.” It’d be too self-conscious if it weren’t so honest.

It’s so great to hear Lenderman find his voice, this hangdog underachiever slowly telling a joke whose every punchline is missin’, leavin’, or lovin’ you. Like the writing on Manning Fireworks, Lenderman’s guitar playing is simple and understated: The riffs are slow-rolled and the solos are short and sweet. One little five-note line carries the mid-life crisis anthem “She’s Leaving You,” leading to Lenderman taking a loud but patient solo that is perhaps a little too underplayed. A Southern breeze drifts in from the occasional lap steel played by Xandy Chelmis and Landon George takes a great turn on the fiddle on the front porch ballad “Rip Torn.” The whole thing sounds polished and synchronized, nothing fractured or lo-fi about it. No one’s shredding or busting out; everyone is just nodding along, casually scoring the slow pace of life and all its little foibles and misfortunes.

This sound is part of what makes Lenderman so endearing—he could convince you to savor the feeling of a warm beer. It all peaks with the great “Wristwatch,” a new signature song whose protagonist is another sad idiot. Making Frank Ocean’s real estate propositions seem sound, he’s got a beach house up in Buffalo and a “houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome,” which is one of the most memorable lines you’ll encounter all year. A vocal harmony locks in on the chorus when he looks down at his stupid little smartwatch that tells him he’s all alone, pathetic and amazing.