Pitchfork has reviewed Bleachers’ new album everyone for ten minutes, and the response lands on Jack Antonoff as both subject and filter: a songwriter using marriage, grief and media attention as raw material while sounding boxed in by all three. The review hears the record as a self-referential album built around a public figure who seems unable, or unwilling, to step outside his own story.
That is why jack antonoff is being searched now. He is not just the band’s frontman here; he is the person whose private life has become the album’s organizing principle. The review places everyone for ten minutes in the wake of Bleachers’ 2024 self-titled LP, after the band was described as becoming a proper band with that record, and measures the new release against 2017’s Gone Now. It also frames Antonoff as someone who built a career helping other musicians turn diary entries into pop, only to turn that method back on himself.
The songs make the point in unusually direct fashion. On upstairs at els, the lyrics name Jack and Carly Rae, Laura, Oli and Ray, with the “Jack” in that line referring to Electric Lady recording engineer Jack Manning. On dirty wedding dress, Antonoff rewrites his nuptials to Margaret Qualley as a scene out of Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, using lines like “This reporter makes her way across the room at me,” and “She asks me 'bout my loss, she laughs and calls it canon/She asks if I'll read her latest piece.” The record also includes “we should talk” and the taunting line “‘fore everybody had a hot take from hell.”
That is where the album’s promise of intimacy starts to wobble. The review grants that everyone for ten minutes wants to feel personal, but it describes Antonoff’s perspective as more myopic than intimate, a smaller and more sealed-off view of the world than the closeness the songs appear to be chasing. The recurring “sha-la-la” choruses on at least three tracks add to that feeling, as if the music keeps trying to burst outward while the writing keeps folding back into the same room. Even the title suggests motion and openness, but the content keeps returning to the same self.
One of the sharpest turns comes on i can’t believe you’re gone, a song inspired by the death of Antonoff’s grandmother. Over that grief, he sings, “Some days I’m too scared to even fucking begin,” a line that pushes the record toward rawness without fully escaping its sense of performance. The review also notes that Antonoff is married to a movie star, and that public attention around his life rose further after a memoir and a limited series about his relationship with Lena Dunham, which helps explain why the album feels so occupied with being seen.
What remains unresolved is how much of everyone for ten minutes is autobiography and how much is exaggeration, persona or fiction. The review makes clear that Antonoff has turned the album into a reflection of his public life, but it does not settle whether that reflection is honest enough to feel intimate or too compressed to do more than stare back at itself. For Bleachers, that is the album’s defining fact: it is less a confession than a portrait of what happens when a musician who once helped others mine their diaries decides to mine his own in full view of the room.
More on Bleachers frontman Jack Antonoff ties new album to phones, food and time is available here.
