Bleachers with Samia

Few 21st century artists have had the cultural impact of Jack Antonoff. Through his work as a producer for artists like Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift, The 1975 and Lorde, he’s won eight Grammys to date and filled album of the year lists with records like Norman Fucking Rockwell! and Folklore. For years critics have wondered how his work is so successful and what defines it when it doesn’t quite sound like anything else (Antonoff ignores what’s on trend, even when that’s his last project). His methodology, he reveals, is the same for his production work as it is for writing his music with Bleachers: “The great journey and struggle of creating your sound is to drill further and further into it, while the whole time shocking yourself and the people around you.”

The results are always intimate, confessional and unwaveringly tasteful. Formed as a secret in 2013, Antonoff sought to use Bleachers as a continuation of his life-long need to write and perform his songs with a band. The first three Bleachers albums—2014’s Strange Desire, 2017’s Gone Now and 2021’s Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night—were written through the lens of the loss of his younger sister in 2001. “I do think things happen to people, especially if they’re writers, where it just becomes the starting point for their perspective,” he explains. “I don’t mind that, I like that. Because, the songs I wrote through that lens two years after she died, are very different from the songs I wrote five years later, let alone 10 years. The lens changes wildly.” 

Fourth album, Bleachers, Bleachers first since signing to iconic indie label Dirty Hit, began as a set-piece on the idea of tribute living. “It’s not regressive. If anything, it’s the opposite,” says Antonoff. “If anything, this concept of tribute living makes you want to fly into the future so hard, because someone else couldn’t.” But his personal and professional life began to hit an apex of hope as he began writing this album in 2022: he met the love of his life and now wife, and Bleachers were playing to bigger crowds, still young enough to find it exciting and old enough to be a band that’s as worn-in and emotionally dedicated as a marriage. “It just felt like all of a sudden this world was opening up on both sides. Often things happen in your personal life, or things happen with the band, but to have them so extremely connected in this big new future felt pretty heavy and exactly what I’ve been banging on about on a lot of the past records,” he says. While this move away from seeing the world explicitly through the loss of his sister is something he on occasion feels guilty about, it is, in fact, the very meaning of tribute living.

From triumphant lead single “Modern Girl”, the album’s methodology is laid out in bright soulful technicolour: this is Antonoff’s distinctly New Jersey take on the bizarre sensory contradictions of modern life, on his position in culture—or at the very least opinions on that (“pop music hoarder”)—and on the things he cares about, namely the band and its individual members. In the mix, each instrument is heard for its idiosyncrasies and the personality of the player behind it; sonically it’s sad, it’s joyful, it’s music for driving on the highway to, for crying to and for dancing to at weddings.