Jack Antonoff says Bleachers’ fifth album, Everyone for Ten Minutes, grew out of the way phones have shortened the space people once had to think, drift and dream. Speaking in an interview at Electric Lady Studios on a sunny spring morning in New York, the Bleachers bandleader said the record, out May 22, takes its title from an AirDrop setting that briefly lets nearby iPhone users send content to a phone.
That tiny digital window became the frame for an album Antonoff describes as a reaction to constant interruption. “You used to dream at night, and you’d be filled with these weird feelings,” he said. “Now, the second you look at your phone, all that disappears.” He went further: “The relationship to the phone has, only for the benefit of billionaires, robbed us of that time.”
Antonoff’s comments give the album a direct line from private habit to public anxiety. He said his timeline is packed with dog videos and reflections of his “very stressful relationship” with food, and that the scroll has become its own kind of appetite. “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.”
The record’s focus on distraction and consumption also fits the way Antonoff works. He said he has to get songwriting done first thing in the morning before anything outside can intrude, and he sometimes opened his Notes app and started tapping through suggested words until they formed accidental poetry. The words that kept surfacing — missing, loving and on my way — fed into the album’s language. “My life is about running, missing, and loving,” he said. For readers looking for more on the project, Antonoff has already outlined how phones, food and mornings shaped the album in a separate interview at this link.
The tension in the album’s idea is that Antonoff is writing against the very devices and feeds that help carry the music to listeners. Even as Everyone for Ten Minutes turns a setting buried in an iPhone menu into a title, it is also a reminder that the same phone that delivers a song can erase the quiet that song came from. Antonoff said his years touring the continental United States as a teenager are detailed on the standout track “The Van,” which adds a road-tested memory to an album built around the interruptions of modern life.
What comes next is simple enough: Bleachers’ fifth album arrives on May 22, and Antonoff has already made clear what it is arguing with. The record is not trying to escape the phone so much as name what the phone has taken, and why that loss still matters.
