Review: Bleachers – Bleachers

Bleachers - Bleachers

The atmospheric rise of Jack Antonoff continues on the latest full-length record by Bleachers. The same man that kicked his career off with Steel Train, showcased his songwriting prowess with fun., re-established himself as a solo artist with Bleachers, and along the way became a Grammy winning producer, Antonoff is certainly no stranger to the bright lights. The pressure seemed to be on this ultra-talented artist on Bleachers (his first album on Dirty Hit), and yet Antonoff delivers in more ways than one in his most fully realized record to date. With a sound that feels like a modern take on Bruce Springsteen, paired with the atmospheric elements found in the brooding synths of The 1975 and The Midnight, Bleachers does the near-impossible task of paying homage to where he came from while simultaneously moving the needle forward in his artistic growth. Jack Antonoff is a man of many talents, and they are all on full display on the fourth studio album from Bleachers.

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New Interview With Jack Antonoff

Bleachers

Jack Antonoff recently talked with Vulture:

There’s a song called “Tiny Moves,” which no one’s heard yet. The real story there is I started writing music when I was 14 or 15, and my younger sister was sick then. She died when I was 18, so all my formative experiences with writing music were writing about this massive, heavy, big loss and grief. Then, obviously, that grief grows and changes. It’s such a fertile place to write from, and I’d felt a little bit resigned, not in a comfortable way, just like, Okay, my place in life as a writer is to write about loss through the lens of age. And don’t get me wrong, there’s tons of that on this album. But I met my now-wife, and it feels like a lot of the mythology and armor that I wore — we all say, like, “I can’t get relationships right,” “I don’t do this,” “I’m bad at this.” And when you have a big shift like that, which was really meeting my person, it’s brilliant and amazing, but it’s also destabilizing ’cause you have to deal with all of the past, where you lived by this code that was bullshit. And within that, I found myself writing more conversationally, very deep and very intense. How do you have such a great loss and then also explore other parts of life? I wasn’t able to do that in the past, because I felt like it was not honoring my loss to write about anything else. So, this is the first album where I explore other things, and there’s presence to it that I haven’t had.