Jack Antonoff says Bleachers’ fifth album, Everyone for Ten Minutes, was shaped by the strange pull of the phone and the discipline of getting songs down before the day gets a chance to intrude. Speaking on a sunny spring morning at Electric Lady Studios, he said the record, due May 22, grew out of a feeling that modern attention is being stolen before people even notice it happening.

“The relationship to the phone has, only for the benefit of billionaires, robbed us of that time,” Antonoff said. “Now, the second you look at your phone, all that disappears.”

For Antonoff, that meant working early and fast. He said he has to get his songwriting done first thing in the morning, before anything external can break the spell. The title of the album, he said, comes from the AirDrop setting that lets a phone briefly open itself to nearby iPhone users, a small window of connection that fits the record’s fixation on passing moments and fractured attention.

He also described the daily life feeding into the songs as less polished than it may look from the outside. His timeline, Antonoff said, is full of dog videos and reflections on what he called his “very stressful relationship” with food. “Having food on the way — and bad food, bad, bad, bad food — it’s a real high for me,” he said. “My algorithm has been well trained to be, like, slicing of steaks, frying of fries, and cracking of eggs.”

That mix of appetite, distraction and momentum runs through the way he talks about his life, which he summed up as “running, missing, and loving.” He said he opened his Notes app and started clicking the suggested words, a process that led to lines and fragments he found revealing. The accidental poetry that came out of the app, Antonoff said, told him something real about how he thinks and writes.

The album’s focus on phones and digital distraction is central to Antonoff’s thinking as Bleachers prepares to release its fifth record. He said the title, like the music around it, captures a moment when connection can feel brief, crowded and out of reach at the same time. That same instinct appears in the stray phrases he offered about everyday life: “Blah blah, on my way…,” “Blah blah blah, at the studio,” and “Love you, love you, miss you, miss you.”

Antonoff’s own interests outside the studio also surfaced in the conversation. He said his go-to Wawa order is a home-style turkey sandwich on white bread, not a hoagie. And he pointed to years spent touring the continental United States as a teenager, a stretch of life he said is detailed on the Everyone for Ten Minutes standout “The Van.” For now, though, the album’s clearest message is the one Antonoff kept coming back to: if the phone wins the morning, the song may never get written.