Bleachers Hit a Ceiling on Everyone For Ten Minutes

With his production fingerprints on landmark records by Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar and Lorde over the past decade, Jack Antonoff’s ubiquity has reshaped how people hear him. The same sonic signatures that made him the defining producer of his generation now arrive with a set of expectations the fifth Bleachers album does little to complicate.

Everyone For Ten Minutes follows 2024’s self-titled record, which itself felt like a consolidation more than a step forward. Where 2021’s Take The Sadness Out Of Saturday Night balanced Springsteen-sized scale with genuine looseness, this new set plants Antonoff firmly inside a comfort zone he seems reluctant to leave. The saxophone lines, the Tunnel of Love-era warmth, the lo-fi vocal textures, the towering walls of sound. It’s all here, arranged capably but rarely surprisingly.

A few moments register. Closer “Upstairs at Els” carries an infectious charge. “You Forever” climbs toward a crescendo that lands. Opener “Sideways” gestures at something slower and more atmospheric, a direction the rest of the album doesn’t pursue. “Take You Out Tonight” flirts with real strangeness in its intro before settling back into familiar energy. These flashes make the surrounding safety feel more like a limitation than a choice.

The album remains well-crafted. No track collapses. But Antonoff has written sharper songs with bolder arrangements before, both with this band and for others. The disconnect between the ambition he draws out of his collaborators and the conservative instincts guiding his own project has rarely been this visible. Everyone For Ten Minutes ends up feeling less like a statement and more like evidence that Bleachers may have exhausted the current sound’s possibilities.