Watch MJ Lenderman cover Pink Floyd and Neil Young to open Night Club 101 in New York

MJ Lenderman performed a surprise set at the opening of New York City’s new Night Club 101 on New Year’s Eve. Check out the footage below.

The venue, named after its address at 101 Avenue A, is located on the site of New York’s iconic Pyramid Club, which closed permanently in 2021 after shutting its doors during the COVID pandemic.

Opened in 1981, Pyramid Club held early performances from Madonna, Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Nirvana. It is also where LGBTQIA+ icons such as drag queen RuPaul first took the stage in New York City.

Night Club 101, operated the team behind Brooklyn venue Baby’s All Right, rang in the new year with their first show, dubbed their ‘New Year’s Rocking Eve’. The set was billed as Water From Your Eyes “+all our friends live and DJ (TBA)”, which was later confirmed to be Lenderman, Voyeur, Amiture, and Toast.

Lenderman’s set saw him play a string of covers, including Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’, George Strait’s ‘Amarillo By Morning’, Neil Young’s ‘Lotta Love’, and America’s ‘Sister Golden Hair’. Check out the footage below.

Days before his New Year’s Eve performance, Lenderman joined Yo La Tengo on stage in New York to cover Bob Dylan.

The collaboration took place during Yo La Tengo’s Hannukah residency at the Bowery Ballroom in the city, which saw the band play every night until January 1.

Lenderman and his band The Wind were the opening act on the night and he later popped up again during Yo La Tengo’s set to play a version of ‘Something There Is About You’, a track from Dylan’s 1974 album ‘Planet Waves’.

Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley was also on drums for the performance. Click here to see footage.

Elsewhere, Lenderman recently covered Counting Crows’ ‘A Long December’ in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina.

His fourth album ‘Manning Fireworks’ was released in September and landed a spot on NME’s 50 best albums of 2024 list. The track ‘She’s Leaving You’ was also included in NME’s 50 best songs of 2024.

“Breakup songs can contain multitudes: despair, uncertainty, full-throated resentment. MJ Lenderman’s writing on ‘She’s Leaving You’, on the other hand, is characterised by a shrugging, clear-eyed sadness, leaning into the abject silence of heartbreak in its refrain: “It gets dark, we all got work to do,” NME wrote. “Slacker rock melancholia at its most enlightened.”