There is a version of Jack Antonoff who never gets to be himself. He is the one who shows up in the credits of every album you loved this decade — the architect behind the grandeur of Taylor Swift's catalog, the brooding shimmer of Lana Del Rey's records, the confessional pop of Lorde and Sabrina Carpenter. He is everywhere, and that ubiquity has a cost: it makes it genuinely easy to forget that Bleachers, the band he has led since 2013, is not a side project. "everyone for ten minutes," the band's fifth album, released May 22 via Dirty Hit, is his loudest argument yet that it never was.
The album arrives out of a very specific moment of friction. When Antonoff married actress Margaret Qualley in 2023 at a Jersey Shore venue, a crowd of onlookers gathered outside — not for the couple, but for a glimpse of a certain superstar collaborator in attendance. In a letter to fans, Antonoff called it a "dipshit palooza." Out of that annoyance came "dirty wedding dress," one of the album's most exuberant tracks, a song about the people on the inside versus the noise on the outside. Antonoff has been clear that the song is not really about the wedding at all — it is about the boundary between the people who genuinely know you and the transient ones who want a piece of your soul without earning it. It is a theme that runs through the whole record, and it gives "everyone for ten minutes" a coherence that feels earned rather than engineered. The lead single, "you and forever" — released with a music video featuring Qualley — announced that theme from the outset, and it was followed by "the van," "dirty wedding dress," and "i'm not joking" before the album arrived in full.
The album opens with "sideways" and moves into "the van," a Jersey-worshipping reverie about Antonoff's early years touring in smaller bands — including Outline and Steel Train — before Bleachers existed. Grief threads through the record too — Antonoff has spoken openly about losing his sister when he was eighteen, and the way that loss became the engine of his creative life. "I feel like we're all death-closeted or something," he told NPR. That willingness to name the thing other pop records politely avoid gives "everyone for ten minutes" its weight. The closing track, "upstairs at els," is an ode to Electric Lady Studios in New York, where the album was recorded, and it ends things in moving synth-pop fashion — a love letter to the room where Antonoff has made so much of the music that defines this era. Production across the record is credited to Antonoff, and the result leaps between harmony-laden folk rock, shimmering pop soul, and the sax-assisted New Jersey sound that has become Bleachers' signature.
Bleachers is now a formal six-member band, and that matters. The self-titled fourth album in 2024 culminated in a sold-out world tour that finished with the band's largest headline show to date at Madison Square Garden; the band is heading out on the Bleachers Forever world tour behind this one. There is a real question of whether Antonoff's highly recognizable production fingerprint will ever fully share the frame with the band around him — but "everyone for ten minutes" makes a stronger case for the collective than anything before it. The Bandcamp description calls it "the inevitable culmination of a lifetime of devotion to bands," and that reads less like marketing copy than like an actual thesis.
Critical reception has been split, which is almost predictable. Some reviewers find it their most essential work yet, others their least. The honest answer is probably somewhere in the middle: this is a record that rewards patience and punishes impatience, and it asks you to take Bleachers seriously on their own terms rather than as a footnote to someone else's discography. Antonoff put it plainly: "It's about the album. It's about the lyrics, it's about the way it's played or sang, and it's about the fucking show." After thirteen years, he is still making that case. The fact that he still has to make it at all is the most interesting thing about "everyone for ten minutes" — and the most human.
