Jack Antonoff doesn’t experience career progression the way most people do. For one thing, he’s not sure “progression” is even the right word. “Fun was a detour,” he says. “Bleachers is the throughline. Steel Train was the beginning. That’s the real lineage.”
For a guy who’s spent the last decade becoming pop’s behind-the-scenes fixer—co-writing and producing cultural landmarks with Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, Florence Welch, St. Vincent, and more—Antonoff’s newest act is looking inward. Really inward. As in, he’s finally self-titled a Bleachers album.
“I had a whole title planned,” he admits. “‘Tribute Living.’ But the more I worked on it, the more it felt like… this is Bleachers. Not the idea of it. Not the references. Not the 1980s sax solos. Just… the band. My friends. This version of my life.”
Antonoff says this new record marks the first time he’s written from a place other than grief. After losing his sister at 18, much of his musical output—from Steel Train through the early Bleachers years—carried that trauma like a shadow. “I thought that would be my perspective forever,” he says. “And I was okay with that.”
But something changed. “I got married. The band evolved. I stopped referencing old synth sounds and started referencing how we sound live. This is the first album where the inspiration was us.”
That includes “Tiny Moves,” a track Antonoff calls the best he’s ever written—though don’t expect him to explain why. “If you could cut me open, that’s the music that would come out,” he shrugs. “Sometimes you just feel it. That’s enough.”
“Modern Girl” and “Me Before You” carry that same instinct. There’s big sax, playful vocals, shout-along choruses, and something cinematic pulsing underneath. “I always think of albums like movies,” he says. “And this one is about someone actually moving on. Not toying with the idea—doing it.”
And like any movie worth its runtime, this one has Lana Del Rey in the third act. She shows up on the surreal “Alma Mater,” a song that drifts through the ether like a half-remembered prom night. “Her voice is perfect,” Antonoff says. “Comforting and scary at the same time. It’s her and Roy Orbison, that’s it for me.”
Lana’s been a frequent collaborator, and the comfort between them shows. “Alma Mater” sounds like two ghosts making a record in a high school hallway at midnight.
Even the bleaker cuts—like the emo-flecked “Jesus Is Dead” or the spiritual awakening of “Woke Up Today”—feel newly resolved. “I used to be afraid to write from other perspectives,” he says. “Now I’m not.”
Still, Antonoff is aware of the current landscape, where monoculture is fractured and every artist is one misquote away from becoming the discourse du jour. “I think we’ll get past that,” he says. “Artists and journalists are both just trying to survive the content minefield.”
He says it all with a wry calm that probably comes from producing half of pop music in the last five years. But don’t confuse that success with comfort. This new Bleachers record isn’t a flex. It’s a surrender. To feeling. To time. To finally moving forward.
“We were kids,” Antonoff sings in the opening line. Then the band kicks in, and it’s clear—they still are.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
