The online world has generally not been the kindest to Jack Antonoff. There are whole articles and videos dedicated to hating on his music. While I’m not totally averse to his style nor as parasocially invested in the melodrama behind his romantic history, I do understand the frustration around his tendency to genuflect heavily at the altar of his inspirations (mainly Bruce Springsteen) and prioritize feeling and yearning over depth and variety. On everyone for ten minutes, his fifth and latest album as the frontman for Bleachers, Antonoff confronts how he’s perceived in these ways, especially online, by grappling with the frustration of maintaining real connections and a creative spirit in the soul-deadening attention economy. He channels this discomfort and his desire to move through it into his most ambitious and unrestrained work to date, yet the record is still frustratingly unable to fully shake off some of its most formulaic impulses.
Antonoff’s go-for-broke commitment to making more daring stylistic choices this time around is definitely admirable, especially in contrast to his group’s last effort, 2024’s safe and opaque Bleachers. Throughout this album, he folds elements of country, soul, gospel, shoegaze, samples, and even the FaceTime dial tone into the instrumentation. He sounds much more eager to be vulnerable than before, a noticeable shift from the pleasant, crowd-pleasing broadness that characterized his previous work. His attempt to use a pertinent topic—how technology disrupts the intimacy and communication in our relationships—as a lens for the record serves as an intriguing thematic framework for its freewheeling production. And Antonoff bakes the tension between this creative alchemy and encroaching anxiety not just in the album’s sound and theme, but in its aesthetic as well: everyone for ten minutes is named after an AirDrop setting that allows anyone to share files with you for ten minutes; its stark black-and-white cover depicts a shirtless, head-shaven Antonoff hunched over in agony; and the lowercase lettering of its song titles reflects the casualness of text speak.
But despite its restless energy, emotional urgency, and thematic timeliness, everyone for ten minutes has the opposite effect of Bleachers. It’s often exhausting to listen to, bursting with an overzealous earnestness that becomes a bit grating the harder and louder it gets. This rowdier approach, of course, makes a more striking impression than Antonoff’s more innocuous ideas but, ironically, a lot of the album’s extremity can be tied back to him doubling down on his Springsteen-lite affectations: an abundance of “la la la”s (or “sha la la”s), sax solos, Jersey references, and bombastic sounds and songwriting that aim to embody epic grandeur. everyone for ten minutes is Bleachers squared, all familiar territory that’s been rendered bigger and wider, but not necessarily deeper.
Even with the continual reliance on its influences, Bleachers’ eclectic bells and whistles do occasionally stir. The album opens with “sideways,” a love anthem whose woozy stadium rock atmosphere functions as a compelling anchor for Antonoff’s affections for his partner, Margaret Qualley. On top of waxing wife-guy poetic, he makes clever, propulsive use out of sampling older works to convey his nostalgia for the glory days of his band and other projects he’s done. “the van,” for instance, crunches and loops the soul-pop of Blue Magic’s “Just Don’t Want to Be Lonely” into a disarmingly lovely gateway for Antonoff’s memories of his first tours. “you and me forever” incorporates a subtle interpolation of the noodling synth string from Q Lazzarus’ “Goodbye Horses,” one that’s well-suited for the song’s starry-eyed ambiance. The funky closer “upstairs at els” loosely invokes the title of Yazoo’s Upstairs at Eric’s, as well as the new wave band’s sparkling grooves. And though it doesn’t use any samples, the penultimate track “i’m not joking” is perhaps the closest the album comes to a truly inspired moment with the way it bittersweetly views the present and future. Antonoff croons about being grateful for his loved ones and wanting to hold onto them tightly, and the song’s swelling organ and gentle harpsichord give that feeling a genuinely soulful quality.
There’s no denying the heart behind these tracks, but even with the passion and allusions on display, everyone for ten minutes generally strains to conjure the emotional catharsis it so badly wants to elicit, particularly when it rubs up against its well-meaning but clunky cultural critique. That pertains especially to “we should talk,” which bungles its catchy synth-pop beat and its sincerity around the act of rekindling with “phone bad” commentary straight out of the late-period Taylor Swift playbook (“We shared a brain in 2012 / ‘Fore everybody had a hot take from Hell”). On “take you out tonight,” Antonoff postures himself like a millennial pastor, preaching the gospel of self-expression in Auto-Tune (“Make the records I wanna make / Fuck off and tell them anything”), but the concerted attempt to rouse the listener with the manic fervor of a church service turns the song into a bit of an overwrought mess. And on the album’s longest track, “dirty wedding dress,” Antonoff packs in a ton of references to his career and married life, but he stifles its winding meta-narrative with insistent, obnoxious screeching and a sentimental, overly familiar E Street Band instrumental that makes the whole thing a chore to listen to.
As with the majority of Bleachers’ work, Antonoff remains impressively dogged in his pursuit of creating albums that intend to sound and feel monumental, even though the sum of their parts never end up being greater than the whole. And as Antonoff himself mentioned in a recent cover story for Paste, he seems content with just doing the things he loves and letting them speak for themselves, no matter what the internet says about him. But even with a more zeitgeisty angle and larger-scale production, everyone for ten minutes once again hits on an issue that’s plagued Antonoff throughout his career: it still feels like he’s chasing an experience rather than truly capturing one. [Dirty Hit]
Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress, and Metacritic. You can find him on X @samiamrosenberg.
