Bleachers’ everyone for ten minutes: Returning With Their Signature Sound on Their Most Personal Record Yet
Jack Antonoff has made a name for himself in the indie pop-rock genre over the past decade, notably through his work with some of modern music’s biggest names: Taylor Swift, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, and Clairo. His fingerprints are hard to miss, with those bright, 80s-inspired synths that propel tracks like Getaway Car and Green Light. And that same energy is prevalent in his own music with his band, Bleachers.
Two years after releasing their critically acclaimed self-titled LP in 2024, the band returns with their fifth studio album, everyone for ten minutes. Across 11 tracks, Bleachers deliver their signature blend of 80s-inspired synths, saxophones, and Antonoff’s warm harmonies that give Bleachers their nostalgic charm. The album’s title came from an unexpected moment of inspiration: while sending himself a track over AirDrop, Antonoff noticed the prompt “everyone for 10 minutes” on his screen and found something quietly profound in it. It seems that even technology understands that you can’t make yourself available to everyone indefinitely.
Having followed Bleachers since their Gone Now era, I’ll admit I came into this album with some hesitation. The singles leading up to the release weren’t quite clicking for me the way past releases had. It’s a difficult bar to clear when you’ve already given listeners tracks such as Modern Girl, Tiny Moves, and Chinatown, the latter of which featured Antonoff’s inspiration, Bruce Springsteen. It’s songs like these that capture something essential about Bleachers: the layered production, the New Jersey soul, the feeling that anything in life is possible.
But boy, was I wrong, and the opening track made that clear from the first second.
The first two tracks, sideways and the van, set the album in motion with the confident momentum of a film you already know you’re going to love. The van wastes no time announcing itself differently with a melodic orchestral sample interrupted by a repetitive drum fill, which then gives way to a hip-hop breakbeat that is not common with Bleachers’ usual sonic palette, yet somehow manages to blend perfectly with the signature saxophones and harmonicas of the track. Both tracks find Antonoff reaching back to when he was fifteen, the age he left home to chase music, departing from everything his ancestry had quietly demanded of him. In sideways, the line “Shouted hello bastards / As we left our ancestors” carries the weight of that departure lightly, a boy breaking an unspoken pact with generations who believed safety meant a house, a stable job, a family. “Gave me one-way tickets / Made this blood pact rigid” doubles down on the finality of that choice, a choice that would set the course for the rest of his life.
The third track, we should talk, keeps the tempo moving but carries something heavier underneath: the unspoken life changes that come with growing and moving on. It brings the listener to the present day, where the title alone is enough to conjure a face, a name, a conversation you’ve been putting off. Antonoff has described it as a song about miscommunication and the words that are left unsaid between the people closest to you, as you just get swept up in everyday life. The first verse does enough to showcase this feeling, despite once shared dreams and memories, you look around and realise things are different, but no one ever really, really talks about it. “We had a band, we had a life, we had dreams / In a van we wrote our own Bible supreme / Then you got a house, a lawn, a wife, and a kid / And those dreams turned to memories and that’s where it ends.” There’s no bitterness in it, just a practical accounting of how life diverges, and the quiet grief of realising nobody ever really stopped to talk about it. It’s one of the most universally relatable moments on the record.
If you keep up with the world of Jack Antonoff, it is no secret that he is a man in love. Bleachers fans will have already caught glimpses of it in Isimo, in Tiny Moves, and in Lana Del Rey’s Margaret, named after Antonoff’s wife, Margaret Qualley. So the love songs scattered across everyone for ten minutes feel less like a deviation and more like a natural continuation. You and forever, the lead single that arrived on February 11th early this year, is the most straightforward of them: hopeful and romantic in a way that doesn’t try to be clever about it, the kind of song that just wants you to feel the feeling. Lines such as “I had never known my name until you spoke it from your chest / Yes, the heavens opened up and pulled me in / I stared and said, ‘Oh, yeah’ / That’s forever” very clearly depict love at first sight.
Dirty wedding dress takes a different shape entirely. It opens with a delicate piano before breaking into a burst of saxophones and bright guitars, underscored by strings that make the whole thing feel like a celebration. But if you listen closely, the song is saying something, quietly, beneath its jubilance. The lines “Now only my people can see me / Only my people come in / Everybody outside talkin’ like they know / But no, they don’t know” sit at the heart of the album’s central tension, and loop back to the premise of its title. There’s an irony in writing a song about your marriage, an event the public already knows about, but also using it to insist on the privacy of that love. Antonoff is extending a hand to the public while making clear exactly how far the invitation goes. Yet this is not meant to spite, but rather, emphasise that not everyone is meant for everyone, and that’s a perfectly normal thing in life.
The album closes with upstairs at els, a love letter to Electric Lady Studios in New York City, the recording home that has shaped much of Bleachers’ output. It draws on an 80s palette, which is warm with a groove that keeps things moving even as the lyrics settle into something more reflective. Antonoff sings about friends, rooftops, and shared time, “We got a world and we got a way / Me and my friends drinking on a roof”, and threads in references to Gone Now, the band’s second studio album, grounding the nostalgia in something that even fans can relate to. “Now I’m walking in the Sunday Park with Lee / Smiles and says it’s hard to believe” has the quality of a memory surfacing unexpectedly, the kind that arrives with more warmth than sadness. The drum beats are bright and steady, the tempo unhurried, and the overall effect is one of resolution rather than loss, like the final scene of a coming-of-age film where the credits roll not in grief, but in gratitude.
Everyone for ten minutes is Antonoff’s invitation into his life, marriage, memories, and deep thoughts — but only for the length of the album. Because, as the title suggests, that door is not going to stay open forever.
