Jack Antonoff's Bleachers released everyone for ten minutes, the band's fifth studio album, on May 22 via RCA. The record runs 11 tracks across 39 minutes — all song titles styled in lowercase, most written by Antonoff alone, all four advance singles ("you and forever," "dirty wedding dress," "the van," "i'm not joking") rolled in across the first four months of the year.
What the record is about
Antonoff has been blunt about the frame in interviews around release: "this version of modernity is trash." The album is his attempt to wrestle with what it means to keep showing up for real relationships, and a creative practice, inside an attention economy designed to dissolve both. It is a producer-songwriter who has spent the last decade as the most in-demand collaborator in pop music (Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, Sabrina Carpenter) reckoning with the public's image of him versus the private work of being a person.
The reviews have split along predictable lines. The praise points to everyone for ten minutes as Antonoff's most ambitious and least formulaic Bleachers record. The critique points to the same Springsteen-coded sonic palette he has worked since 2014, and asks whether anti-modernity from inside the modernity machine can actually move anywhere new.
Where it lands in the New Music Friday
The release fell into a heavy May 22 window. JPEGMAFIA dropped Experimental Rap a day earlier; Channel Tres put out "Pop Pop." Each of those releases solves the problem of cultural saturation differently — Peggy by flooding it, Channel Tres by ignoring it, Antonoff by writing a record about the saturation itself. The shared concern across all three is the same: how do you make something that lasts longer than ten minutes in an environment built to forget it in five?
What's next
A North American tour follows in the fall. The album is on all DSPs.
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