Bleachers - everyone for ten minutes

In between the periods where Jack Antonoff is producing music for all the big names in pop (think Taylor Swift, Lorde, or Lana del Rey), he’s busy fronting Bleachers. It’s no surprise, then, that their fifth album sounds this good. There’s the interlude in ‘sideways’, where saxophones swing surrounding instruments in a tennis match of sorts; then there’s the thrill of ‘you and forever’’s bridge, which plunges into an impassioned refrain: “Fuck everything that I’ve been told cause I just saw the heavens open up”, Jack half-sings, half-screams atop a bed of instrumental chaos starring brass, strings, drums, and guitars.

There’s also something beautifully analogue about the whole record. After Jack slammed people who use AI to make music as “godless whores”, ‘everyone for ten minutes’ feels like a full-band antidote to the encroachment of ChatGPT on creativity. The tiniest details make the album sing, whether it’s the not-quite-there voice crack in ‘dirty wedding dress’ or the subtle, twinkling harpsichord in the background of ‘i’m not joking’. It feels almost as if they’re certifying that the record is 100% human-made.

It’s not without its faults, though. On ‘take you out tonight’, the vocals get lost amongst saxophones and vocoders, but when they emerge from the fog, they sound as precise as ever. ‘dancing’ and ‘she’s from before’ drag the LP into a mid-album lull, but the iridescent sheen of the full-band arrangements of ‘upstairs at els’ end proceedings on a high.

The right word to describe ‘everyone for ten minutes’ is ‘crafted’. Every mix, note, and flourish feels intentional: it’s a tribute to the “ancient ritual” of songwriting, to borrow words from Jack himself. It’s not perfect, but it’s a love-letter, a mission statement, and a display of the magic that can happen when people come together to write songs.