Jack Antonoff Isn’t Just an A-List Pop Producer and Songwriter, He’s an Emo Kid From Jersey Too

Jack Antonoff has almost single-handedly made modern pop into a glorious safe space, an expansive, sensitive, creative biosphere where the biggest artists in the world — from Taylor to Lana to Lorde — can chase their wildest ambitions and find their most real inner selves while still making blockbuster records. Most A-list superproducers are pop scientists. Antonoff is a pop humanist. 

Bleachers is the project where he works out his band side. The three previous Bleachers LPs have highlighted an Eighties-tinged refusal to acknowledge that there should be any distinction between hook-ninja slickness and unrepentant sentimentality, a quality that’s also there in Antonoff’s mega-pop co-writing. 

The fourth, self-titled Bleachers record doesn’t veer too far from their previous LPs. Antonoff is an emo kid from New Jersey who worships Bruce Springsteen and is a firm believer in the spiritual ecstasy that can only be attained through the Platonic perfection of pop formula. Bleachers opens with Antonoff in low-talking Intimate Bruce mode over surging drums and a U2-size guitarscape, as he sets the LP’s warmly nostalgic tone singing, “Future’s past/I’m right on time.” The Springsteen love really takes off on “Modern Girl,” with its Clarence Clemons-like sax blasts, and car-radio-shout-along chorus. Antonoff sings about “modern girls shakin’ their ass tonight,” updating his retro rock with lyrics about meds and webcams. 

He gets lovably personal on the synth-rocker “Jesus Is Dead,” as he looks back on his own mid-2000s golden age of DIY tours and hanging out at the New York hipster dance night Misshapes. “I miss it, all the time,” he laments, contrasting that indie Eden with the strange vibes these days of feeling like “the man who sold the world.” He’s similarly wistful on the National-style sad-dad rock of “Isimo” and on the folky “Woke Up Today,” where Joni Mitchell acoustic chords back a tale of post-breakup bummedness.

Every element of the Bleachers experience comes together on the album’s centerpiece, “Alma Mater.” This one has sax magic and Boss mumbling too, but mainly knocks you over by subtraction rather than addition, boiling down the Born to Run  idealism you hear elsewhere to an elegiac ambiance. Even Lana Del Rey’s appearance on the track feels understated. Antonoff sings about listening to Tom Waits as he drives through Jersey looking for the heart of Saturday night. “Fuck Balenciaga/Right past the Wawa,” he mutters, slipping into his runaway American dream. His life these days is more Balenciaga than Wawa, but Bleachers is a nice reminder of the sweet suburban kid at the heart of his Top 40 win.