Bleachers - everyone for ten minutes

Everyone knows Jack Antonoff. Super-producer of the stars, the man behind so much of the pop lexicon over numerous eras, his credit sheet has at times felt near omnipresent. The five Bleachers albums released across the past decade have not been concessions to the listenership of someone who has, on his other clock, produced records for Lorde, Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift, The 1975 and Florence + The Machine. Despite very much having his own style, in their own way they have been the deliberate opposite, and 'Everyone For Ten Minutes' is the most fully realised version of that opposite to date.

That decade has been a slow burn. From the early hotel-room demos through to the self-titled fourth, Bleachers grew without the chart-and-streaming push that usually accompanies sold-out rooms. The fans showed up because the gigs were the kind of thing you don't see twice. Antonoff's particular brand of grief-stricken optimism - folk-and-synth-and-punk arrangements played as if every show might be the last - turned audiences feral. The relationship between band and crowd became a race in which both sides kept escalating until something cracked open.

'Everyone For Ten Minutes' is what that cracked-open thing has produced. Antonoff wrote the album while also producing Kendrick Lamar's 'GNX' and Sabrina Carpenter's 'Man's Best Friend'. They're three records that, by his own design, sound nothing like one another, but which were all made by someone in roughly the same emotional weather. The Bleachers record is the one where the weather belongs to him. It opens with a pair of origin-story tracks ('Sideways' and 'The Van') that go all the way back to the fifteen-year-old who left home with an emo band because nothing else was going to make sense. From there, the record skips forward to right now: a man married, professionally feted, fourteen Grammys deep, watching the modern world fail in real time, and unable to stop writing about what it feels like to be standing at the cusp of something that hasn't quite arrived.

The record's middle stretch is where its present-tense lives. 'We Should Talk' is the dreamy reflection on people Antonoff has lost touch with — the inevitable price of twenty-five years of touring. 'You And Forever' is the song about the work of preparing yourself for someone else, written in the glow of his 2023 marriage to Margaret Qualley. 'Take You Out Tonight' is the frantic version of the same idea — going out anyway, when the world has increasingly designed itself to make going out exhausting. 'Dirty Wedding Dress' takes the imagery of paparazzi drones at his own wedding and lands on the rather domestic verdict that you keep loving the right people regardless of who's pointing a camera. 'I'm Not Joking', recorded with the whole band live in a single room, is the song Antonoff has named as his favourite Bleachers track to date. It is also the easiest one on here to imagine being permanently rewritten by an audience the moment it's played live.

The album, by Antonoff's own framing, is an essentially hopeful record. Its worldview, beneath that hopefulness, is much darker. The present moment is a stunning collective failure. The ticketing platforms and dating apps and billionaires-as-systems-architects are functioning as designed rather than by accident. The version of modernity we are currently living through has - as one collaborator would put it - failed us. That Antonoff has produced an essentially hopeful album from inside that diagnosis is not denial; it's because he hopes - maybe even believes - the door is about to be kicked in, and that the next phase has a better chance than this one.

Bleachers' pitch has always been the one most acts of their size either refuse to make or are too afraid to. Most acts of their size try to please as many listeners as possible because that is what acts of their size are supposed to do. Antonoff and Bleaches have simply doubled down on the original instinct that the listener you are trying to find is the one whose life this record is for. 'Everyone For Ten Minutes' is the title of an album that knows it has, on the available evidence, an audience already waiting in the room.