On a sunny spring morning on the top floor of Electric Lady Studios, Jack Antonoff laid out the argument at the center of Bleachers' fifth album: phones have stolen a kind of private, dreamlike time from us. "You used to dream at night, and you’d be filled with these weird feelings," he said, and then described how looking at a phone makes that feeling disappear.
The record, titled Everyone for Ten Minutes and scheduled for release on May 22, is his attempt to name what was lost. He said the album title comes from the AirDrop setting that briefly lets nearby iPhone users access a phone, and he insisted the loss of those night moments is not incidental. "The relationship to the phone has, only for the benefit of billionaires, robbed us of that time," Antonoff said.
The numbers and specifics underline the point: this is Bleachers' fifth album, and the first two songs are, he added, "very specifically about leaving." He referenced his own teenage years on the road — details he lays out on the song "The Van" — and the images that shaped his youth, when images from two Gulf Wars and the 9/11 attacks inundated television screens.
That mixture of personal history and cultural overload is threaded through the album. Antonoff said he remembers "leaving for my first tour and feeling like I was leaving the ancestral pact," and he frames the act of writing as a remedy. "The act of writing is hopeful," he said, and quoted a piece of advice from Bruce Springsteen: "If you spend your life touring and making albums, that’s a great life." He made plain that he wants to make records and tour and does not want to be an actor or have a clothing line.
Antonoff described how his daily life is shaped by the very technology he blames. His timeline, he said, is filled with dog videos and reflections of his "very stressful relationship" with food, and he admitted to small, mechanical habits: he often opens the Notes app and clicks the suggested words. The accidental poetry that results, he said, usually comes out as missing, loving, and on my way.
He was sharper in his image of the algorithm: "My algorithm has been well trained to be, like, slicing of steaks, frying of fries, and cracking of eggs." The line is precise and oddly domestic — a way of showing how attention has been conditioned into short, sensory bites rather than long, reflective stretches.
There is a religious dimension to how he thinks about live music. "I think what I do and what the band does on stage is closer to Jesus Christ’s version of church than any of these fucking megachurches I see," Antonoff said, arguing that concerts can restore communal time in ways screens cannot. He punctuated his thoughts with blunt reminders of mortality and risk — "Try holding a dead person" — and offered a kind of permission to take chances: "Failure is not that big a deal."
All of which produces a tension at the center of the record. Antonoff rails against phones while describing his own complicit behaviors; he names a corporate, engineered theft of time but also acknowledges that much of his creative life now runs through the devices in question. That contradiction is baked into Everyone for Ten Minutes: an album shaped both by a desire to recover lost interior hours and by the messy, mediated ways we now keep them.
By the time the record arrives May 22, Antonoff is offering a clear answer to his own charge: he plans to keep making albums and to take them on the road. If phones have stolen moments that once held strange, private feelings, his case is that songs and shows can win some of them back. The album is the attempt — a public, musical reclaiming of ten-minute windows for dreaming and leaving and, simply, writing.
