‘Everyone for Ten Minutes’ review: Bleachers don’t surprise on new album

The condensed version of this review is that yes, Bleachers are back with everyone for ten minutes. And this new album knows exactly who it’s for, and that’s exactly the problem with it. This is Jack Antonoff’s fifth album and likely his most emotionally transparent record. So why is it also his least surprising?

Perhaps there’s a clue in “we should talk,” the third song on everyone for ten minutes, where Jack Antonoff drops a J.D. Salinger reference. “Twin high-maintenance machines” from Franny and Zooey, to be more specific. And it addresses a former friend who, in his telling, the internet “turned on.”

He doesn’t say who. He doesn’t have to. The song’s whole point is the assumption that you already know. That you, the listener, have been close enough to Antonoff’s orbit (or close enough to a friend whose orbit caught fire) to fill in the blank yourself. The chorus is just the title, three times, into a half-line. “We should talk / We should talk / We should.”

So it’s a song about a conversation he wants to have and can’t. Written for an audience that he assumes will recognize the silence. That assumption — generous, intimate, faintly conspiratorial assumption — is the engine of his entire fifth record. It’s also the thing that will determine whether you find everyone for ten minutes a moving piece of mid-career songwriting or a forty-minute exercise in flattering the people already in the room.

Modernity is trash.

Antonoff clearly believes this version of modernity is trash. And everyone probably agrees. And that’s why the answer is to draw a circle around the people who actually know you. In that way, the album’s title is a glancing reference to the contemporary attention economy. The way every artist and every trauma and every wedding now gets a compressed turn in the algorithm before the feed rolls on.

To paraphrase Antonoff himself, there’s almost always a barrier between the people who love you and the ones who want a piece of you but shouldn’t get it. Writing for everyone is pointless. Writing for just one person is creative.

Which is why everyone for ten minutes is, by design, a record for the people inside his circle. It rewards your fluency. It assumes you remember which Bleachers album the line “we took that sadness right from Saturday night” reaches back to. And it assumes you can place the Wawa in Philly in 2000, the Wayne firehouse, the van that “Bleachers Forever” tour merch is currently being sold around. It assumes you’ll catch the wink when, at the end of “upstairs at els,” he walks past Lana’s plaque at Electric Lady and tells you the roof up there is where he met Zem, who is currently playing the saxophone you’re listening to.

The Bleachers brand.

For the fluent, this is a real pleasure. I’d even say everyone for ten minutes is, song-for-song, the most cohesive thing Antonoff has put under the Bleachers name since Gone Now. The genre tourism that bogged down the self-titled record two years ago has settled into something more confident at this point.

Chamber-pop strings under “sideways,” a sun-warmed gospel lift in the back half of “you and forever,” a violin elegy threading through “i can’t believe you’re gone,” and the inevitable saxophone (Zem Audu, now a credited band member rather than a touring sideman) coloring everything with what Antonoff has spent a decade building into a bonafide brand.

The opener is the most fully realized thing here, a slow accumulation that pretends to be a love song and then turns, on a dime, into a friendship-breakup song so unflattering to its addressee — “now you’re all fucked out, yeah, like a walking cash-out, broke-down passage, weekend fascist” — that the chorus’s repeated “I love you sideways” finishes as the diagnosis it is.

He loved this person. This person loved him back at an awkward angle. The whole record onward is interested in those awkward angles.

The holy and the absurd.

What’s new, and what’s worth taking seriously, is how directly Antonoff is willing to write about his sister now. The death of Sarah Antonoff when he was eighteen has shadowed every Bleachers record from Strange Desire forward, but always at the periphery. Like with a felt absence in the production, an emotional charge that the songs declined to fully address. “i can’t believe you’re gone” finally addresses it.

The verses pile up specifics that make the grief feel both holy and absurd. There’s a Burger King crown, sand bottles, essays that outlive their writer. “The car that we drove when you were still around.” The chorus admits to coping strategies it doesn’t quite endorse.

“These hope-filled lies, these unearned traditions / if you repeat them enough, you can live with somebody who’s missing.” It’s easily one of the most adult things he’s ever written. Especially during these halcyon Sabrina Carpenter years.

Hallelujah for three minutes.

The next track, “dancing,” circles the same loss from a different angle. “Dying is not romantic this young / how could you let me do this alone?” And it ends with a chant Antonoff has been working toward his whole career: “Glory to the ones who were left, hallelujah.”

Whether you find this devastating or saccharine depends largely on your tolerance for the word hallelujah deployed without irony. Antonoff is clearly going for devastating.

“she’s from before” is the album’s emotional pivot and its quietest manifesto. Antonoff has spent most of his catalog writing about grief as a condition. So here, for the first time, he writes about marriage as a project of putting the grief down.

“I wanna know the one that I’m named for / I want to understand this shame / I want a son named for my hometown / I want to end the mourning game.”

The pun — mourning doing double duty with morning — is the kind of dad-joke wordplay he usually avoids. The song’s central image, that his wife is “from before” — older than the wound, older than the version of him the wound built — is a genuinely tender thing to say about the person you married. It’s also the only argument the album makes that complicates its loudest one.

The album’s biggest swing.

The framing track of the cycle, “dirty wedding dress,” is at war with the very people listening to it. That includes the streamers, the bullies of the dolls, the critics who moved up the block. And so is “take you out tonight,” which spits at “anyone who hasn’t been here.” “she’s from before” is doing different labor. It’s saying the people inside the circle aren’t here because they’re the cool ones. They’re here because they pre-date the version of you the world has been chewing on.

The trouble — and there is trouble — is that the circle-drawing tracks are louder than the circle-meaning tracks. “dirty wedding dress” is the album’s biggest swing and its most exhausting one. It’s a four-minute aria of grievance against the reporter who laughed at his loss. Some of it is sharp — the line about a writer “Pac-Mannin’ another artist to put a dollar in his pocket” while calling himself a “lone working class man” is an observation only someone inside the publicity machine would think to make.

But the song’s payoff is a four-bar mantra (“now only my people can see me / only my people come in”) that Antonoff repeats often enough to suggest he’s trying to convince himself. The “I love goodbyes” mantra he keeps reaching for sounds, the third time around, like the kind of thing you say when you very much don’t. By the time the outro is counting “one, two, three, make it stop,” I believe him about the stop and not about the love.

Marriage is a cage.

“take you out tonight” has the same problem in different clothes. It opens with the album’s angriest lines — “fuck the world, fuck the gallery, fuck anyone who hasn’t been here” — and then keeps going for another four and a half minutes, escalating its grievances until they cancel each other out.

There’s a real song hiding inside it. The bridge, a quiet four-line confession — “I could try to leave this hell, I’d fucking die on this hill / I could try to leave the road, I’d end up right back in the van / I could try to take your hand, you know I’ll never take your hand” — is psychologically honest, at least.

It’s an admission that marriage is itself part of the cage. He’s saying he can’t fully reach the person he loves because reaching her would require leaving a war. He doesn’t dwell on it, though. The song pivots back into “I gotta take you out and show you off tonight” before the moment ends.

That’s the album about summed up.

Antonoff has the instinct, every time, to crack the surface. And then the production swells, the chorus arrives, the sha-la-la-las kick in, and the crack closes. “i’m not joking,” the late-album love song, is the worst offender. It’s a sweet enough idea (“it was love at first sight / good Lord, I found you”) buried under so much sha-la-la-la-la and so many “shout it out, shout it out” repetitions that the actual content of the love evaporates.

It’s a song that gestures at adoration without ever quite sitting still long enough to feel adored. After “she’s from before” — which says the same thing in half the time and twice the depth — “i’m not joking” plays like a focus-grouped version of an idea Antonoff had already nailed two tracks earlier.

The album closes on “upstairs at els,” and this is where I find myself most divided. As a piece of writing, it’s lovely. It’s a slow, granular tour of the Electric Lady Studios rooftop where Antonoff has made or worked on what feels like half the major pop records of the last decade. He name-checks Blu and Rex and Claud and Lana’s plaque and “Hard Feelings” days into Gone Now nights. And the saxophone solo is, perhaps inevitably, played by the man he met on that very roof.

The refrain — “you’re not at it alone” — is a benediction extended to the people inside the circle. And the song ends with it repeated like a chant or prayer. It’s the credits roll Antonoff has been building toward for years.

And yet.

The credits roll is the moment the movie ends, and the question everyone for ten minutes keeps not quite answering is whether Bleachers, the project, has anywhere left to go after it. Every record Antonoff has made for the last four years has been, on some level, a record about being Jack Antonoff. About the wedding, the friends, the studio, the audience, the haters, the people who get it.

The circle has gotten so well-defined that the songs have started to function as membership cards. “we should talk,” gorgeous as it is, is a song that requires you to already care about the people Antonoff is in conflict with to fully land. “dirty wedding dress” requires you to find the press cycle around his wedding inherently interesting. “upstairs at els” requires you to know who plays the saxophone solo and why that matters.

None of this is disqualifying. Plenty of great records are written for in-groups. But there’s a thinness to the experience of being addressed, song after song, as a person who already agrees. A sense that the album has stopped trying to convince you of anything because it has stopped imagining that you might be unconvinced.

The two songs that escape this dynamic.

“i can’t believe you’re gone” and “she’s from before” are the two songs where Antonoff writes toward grief and marriage as actual experiences instead of as positions in the culture war. They’re the best songs here. They’re also the quietest, the least likely to make it into the encore at Shadow of the City, and the ones least likely to show up in the Spotify pre-saves of the next Bleachers tour cycle. And they’re the ones that suggest a sixth Bleachers album worth making.

There’s a real case to be made that consistency and emotional directness are themselves underrated virtues in a culture that keeps trying to game everyone’s attention. The album tracks mostly follow a through line instead of a mountain range. It’s almost like everyone for ten minutes doesn’t even want to surprise you. Maybe it just wants to greet you. Find you where you’re at. The trouble is that after five albums of greetings, I find myself wanting a conversation instead.

everyone for ten minutes is available now.

---

Images courtesy of RCA Records