Bleachers – everyone for ten minutes

Jack Antonoff is a smart guy with some annoying habits. He continues to best his male pop-rock peers, able to pull off the lofty in a way in which Harry Styles never succeeds, and more tolerable in his quirky state-of-the-union proclamations than grating labelmate Matty Healy. But Bleachers’ conventions (Springsteen simulacra; every crescendo feeling like Judd Nelson’s raised fist; unrelenting spoken word with telegraphs of misery and euphoria that careen between the vague and specific; the impasse of the intolerable present an uncertain future, braced by the millennial condition of raising toasts on sinking ships) can combine to something quite overbearing. Yet once you reach the centre of Bleachers' fifth album, you come to respect their long, earnest mission.

Opening track 'sideways' is connective tissue, re-energising the Lana-assisted, Blue Nile tincture of 2024's Alma Mater with its stalking alto sax, while beatnik anthem 'the van' trades in Antonoff’s usual emphatic abstracts. The overstated prophetic bent will irritate some, but proves a worthy rhetorical jaunt. The 1975 contiguity reveals itself on the zippy 'we should talk', with dynamic licks of autotune and some unwieldy turns of phrase. 'you and forever' is the album’s accent piece, in which nihilism is punctured as a loved-up Antonoff is fully realised. The contracting, quiet chorus retreads are tempered magic; he sees God in his girl, and Things Are Gonna Be Alright.

With its pop-rockabilly verve, the scattershot lyrical vignettes of 'dirty wedding dress' never reach the big time catharsis it transparently apes. 'i can’t believe you're gone' strews in a Nebraska-like malaise and maintains a moving solemnity. The tentative strums on 'dancing' summon Sufjan Stevens sadness, while an aggrieved vocal calls to mind the jaded showman register of Brandon Flowers – 'No, dying is not romantic this young'. 

'she's from before' plays like the pleasant koans of a weathered troubadour, while the committed 'i'm not joking' waxes on lucking-out in love to sincere, winning, and transformative effect: 'All of that fear comes out in the big wash'. The run-on delivery of the recurring line, ‘Me and my friends drinking on a roof’, in album closer 'upstairs at els' accidentally sounds like a punctuating SNL gag, one only made entertaining through blunt force repetition, but we are ultimately ending on an enlightened high.

So for better or worse, Jack Antonoff's good-faith convictions are a mixed bag of pastiche and pioneering; his wordy journey to figuring out What It’s All About. Every breath is a questing polemical, and to pause is to surrender.

Listen to: i’m not joking, you and me forever, take you out tonight