Ten minutes is all we’re owed.
No working producer in music is litigated quite like Jack Antonoff and his fifth record under the Bleachers name imposes itself fully aware of it. The title is already a thesis about access, about how much of a man the world is owed, and the answer it ventures becomes plain once the noise settles. Everyone is granted ten minutes, that’s it; his people keep the rest. What the rollout sold as the hopeful, lovestruck record turns out to be something holier and graver: an origin story that spirals, against its own will perhaps, back into Antonoff’s oldest grief and draws a hard line between the few permitted inside and the many left talking at the door.
The grief is no novelty to him; it is, however, newly direct. The ghost of his sister, dead at 13, has shadowed every Bleachers album from the periphery. Here, on “i can’t believe you’re gone,” it moves to the center at last, tending its small relics—a paper crown, a preserved room—with a steadiness that never tips into sentiment. “dancing” fires a shot of reality, reminding listeners that dying young is no kind of romance, and “she’s from before” reframes marriage itself as the work of putting mourning down. Throughout, Antonoff reaches for a liturgical vocabulary, all opened heavens and baptisms and hallelujahs offered up in litany, until what might have been confession takes on the cadence of ritual. It is his theological album, and the religiosity serves not as the fashionable ornament lately overemployed on the indie scene so much as it is the central argument.
It is also, unmistakably, a mise-en-abîme of the argument he made off-record this spring, when he branded those who make art via AI “godless whores” and bade them drive off a cliff. Whatever conclusion one reaches from this sermon by one of the most ubiquitous producers alive, the record runs on: music as a human and sacred ritual set against a profane outside world of stream counters and critics angling for a favor. The wall the songs keep policing—that only his people are permitted to see him—is the same one the manifesto threw up. The album is its better expression because here the contempt is leavened by tenderness and by a certain terror of being perceived. That the result is at war with the listeners it courts is a contradiction it never truly resolves and is more authentic for being left open.
The sound leaves an indelible imprint. Antonoff remains a maximalist of generational talent, toying with saxophone, Hammond organ, detuned guitar and voices reworked as instruments until each track becomes its own phrase of singular richness and complexity. He knows, too, that as the press is keen to point out, the whole New Jersey mythology sounds like a Bruce Springsteen song, and the record’s wager is that telling it again, in his own words, redeems the borrowing. The less charitable will hear only the boardwalk affectations blasted louder. Hapless lads or “godless whores,” they will be missing the warmth. “upstairs at els” dissolves the project into a rooftop roll call of the band, friends and collaborators from across his sprawling body of work and answers the loneliness that opened the record with its closing promise: that no one who made it inside was ever, for a moment, alone.
Throughout these principle-exceeding 39 minutes, Bleachers let the audience in. The result is a record that feels deeply personal while remaining expansive in scope, one that transforms private grief into communal ritual and leaves a lasting impression long after its final notes fade.
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