Something uncanny happens during “upstairs at els,” the closing track on Bleachers’ new album. Jack Antonoff is weaving through a party on the roof of Electric Lady Studios, picking out faces from the mass of people: “Inside Jack and Carly Rae/Part of the band, Laura, Oli, and Ray.” Turns out that “Jack” is Electric Lady’s recording engineer, Jack Manning, but for a moment, I thought Antonoff was recounting an out-of-body experience, a glimpse of himself from outside himself. Even since Bleachers became a proper band with 2024’s self-titled LP, the project remains, at its core, the musings and ruminations of a man who built a career by helping other musicians spin their private diary entries into neon-lit, billboard (and Billboard)-sized pop music. On everyone for ten minutes, Antonoff’s preferred subject—what it’s like to be Jack Antonoff—starts to feel more myopic than intimate. Hemmed in by a cluttered mix and NIMBYish paranoia, this album will test even a loyal fan’s investment in its creator.
Titled after an Apple AirDrop setting you’ve probably never used, everyone for ten minutes is nominally Bleachers’ “What if phones, but too much?” record. Antonoff seems to have studied up on the teachings of Justin Vernon, modern patron saint of white-boy gospel music, and even Laurie Anderson—both artists with foundational works in the canon of digital disconnection—but his prevailing instinct is to shoot for the middle. “we should talk,” another of those wan synth-pop numbers he was cooking up in batches for Taylor Swift a few years back, coats his voice in bro-country Auto-Tune as he mourns an era “‘fore everybody had a hot take from hell.” Here and across most of the album, Antonoff comes off like a crotchety war vet boxing at shadows. “This reporter makes her way across the room at me,” he sneers on “dirty wedding dress,” which rewrites his nuptials to Margaret Qualley as a scene out of Darren Arnofsky's Mother! “She asks me 'bout my loss, she laughs and calls it canon/She asks if I'll read her latest piece.”
Antonoff is bristling against a media and listening public that have found the details of his personal life ever more juicy after the one-two punch of a Lena Dunham memoir and the Lena Dunham limited series that was unofficially-but-unmistakably about their extensively documented relationship. When he gets a rare moment to himself, everyone for ten minutes can actually breathe. The claustrophobic honky-tonk of “dirty wedding dress” lets up with a trip down the shore to visit his mom. “i can’t believe you’re gone,” a laudanum waltz inspired by the death of Antonoff’s grandmother, wades through mixed metaphors and non sequiturs until Antonoff drops the song’s title and finally cracks it open: “Some days I’m too scared to even fucking begin,” he cries, though that’s a self-reference, too. Three of the record’s catchier tracks (“dirty wedding dress,” “dancing,” “i’m not joking”) hinge on a well-placed “sha-la-la”—a Bleachers staple and reminder that Antonoff does his best work in grand gestures and shout-along hooks. But he’s abandoned much of the communal, unifying power that fuels the rock music he aspires toward.
The Antonoff of the early Bleachers albums was pop’s pint-sized pugilist, muscling his way to the front of the pack. Musically, everyone for ten minutes isn’t all that distinct from, say, 2017’s Gone Now, except now its jabs are pointed downward and the boxer is married to a movie star. Yet the way his collaborators describe him, you’d think Antonoff was a Tommy Bahama-clad Buddhist monk: if you’re actively pushing your artistry forward, he’ll come along, but he’s just as content to lounge by the pool and make 31 songs that all kind of sound the same. everyone for ten minutes boasts at least one stone-cold charmer, “i’m not joking,” a dewy-eyed soul jam that sounds like Antonoff drunkenly serenading his wife to Sam Cooke at karaoke night. And he actually seems happy, certainly happier than on “take you out tonight,” one more tortured Springsteen pastiche about life on the road that builds to a deflating balloon of an instrumental vamp. Tripping over his words, Antonoff begs for “one conversation with my people and my home,” as if his people aren’t standing sidestage with mildly concerned but loving smiles.
