Featured image: Album Cover (Press)
Following the success of 2024’s self-titled album Bleachers and their biggest world tour yet, New Jersey pop-rock band Bleachers are back with fifth studio album everyone for ten minutes, released on their label Bleachers Band Recordings and Dirty Hit.
Recorded at New York’s iconic Electric Lady Studios, Bleachers’ fifth studio album hit shelves at the end of May. The record welcomes fans back into their world with signature ’80s synth lines, earworm pop melodies and a generous helping of saxophone, but this time through the introspective lens of lead writer and pop mega producer Jack Antonoff. Paying homage to one of their biggest influences and fellow New Jersey native, Bruce Springsteen, the band bring all the ’80s goodness and merge it with a refreshing vulnerability that marks a whole new sound and era of Bleachers.
The album features callbacks in lyrics from the band’s earlier work, including 2014’s ‘Shadow’, and even references Lana Del Rey’s ‘Margaret’ – co-written by Antonoff and featuring the band – a dreamy ballad about Antonoff’s wife, Margaret Qualley. The new direction signals an era of reflection for Bleachers: a coming-of-age of sorts, centred on confronting and letting go of past hurt and trauma.
Antonoff’s vulnerability pays off. Wearing his heart on his sleeve and being honest, open and earnest, the album is poetry with melody. Tracks ‘i can’t believe you’re gone’, (which got a haunting acoustic makeover for Later… with Jools Holland) and ‘dancing’ recognise the pain in Antonoff, sharing personal stories of tragedy from his life, such as the childhood loss of his younger sister Sarah. Other songs interact with each other, like two people telling the same story but from different perspectives, on ‘wedding dress’ and ‘upstairs at els’. Some tracks simply feel like a love letter to New York, but the album as a whole feels like a diary, telling you stories and anecdotes from Antonoff’s personal life with unabashed detail.
Arriving just in time for summer, everyone for ten minutes feels like the soundtrack to a coming-of-age film. So sit in the garden late in the evening – with friends, lovers, with whoever happens to be around – and soak up the stories.
Bleachers everyone for ten minutes is out now on Dirty Hit.
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awesome review !!