Why I won't calm down about the new Bleachers album

If you'd call this a review—I’ve been waiting for the fourth Bleachers album since November

Mar 13, 2024

a person's hand on a bed next to a vinyl album — Photo by Jazmin Quaynor on Unsplash

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A warning before reading: Bleachers is my favorite band.

I discovered the Jack Antonoff-fronted band late into my sophomore year of high school and immediately fell in love with their Bruce Springsteen-inspired sound, like something from an 80s film. The lyrics are sad, but the music gives you no choice but to get up and dance away the pain. Scratch that. You dance with the pain. You grab your pain by the wrists and swing it around until everything feels better.

I’ve been waiting for the self-titled fourth album since the band announced the tracklist in January, despite my fears it wouldn’t live up to their third album “Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night,” which already didn’t live up to the second album “Gone Now,” although I’m not sure any album will.

Bleachers soundtracked my young adulthood. I feel the need to caution you in case you are someone who believes in completely unbiased reviews, you sweet child you.

I am a Bleachers fan in the way most Swifties are Swifities (Okay, maybe nothing is that extreme), but when I say I didn’t love a Bleachers record, like the third album, rest assured I still listen to the songs repeatedly. My scale for rating this band is tipped. From 1-10, I’ll only go as low as 6 and as high as 20.

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Take “Modern Girl,” for example. “Modern Girl,” the first single off this new album, is good. It’s nothing profound, no “Don’t Take the Money” or “Everybody Lost Somebody.” But it’s fun. It has a saxophone (I love a saxophone), and I love the Instagram caption-worthy lyric “New Jersey’s finest New Yorker.”

“Alma Mater” gave me more hope. The song detailed reckless scenes of young adulthood, and reminded me of two earlier songs “All my Heroes” and “Wake Me.” Something about the lyric “Screaming fuck Balenciaga, right passed the Wawa” made me nostalgic for when I first fell in love with the band.

Then came “Tiny Moves.” I didn’t love this track right away. Then, I wanted to play it again. And again. One more time. Then I was spinning around my room to it. My God, I want to break out dancing in the subway to this song. This is the Bleachers I love. Maybe this album could be “Gone Now”-material after all.

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The Bleachers album made me realize what was missing from the third album that made me like but not love it was the heart. The sound hadn’t changed much from the first two albums, but there weren’t any real gut-punch moments I can recall. This album had a lot, like Antonoff’s emotional declaration “I’m still here, I’m still playing” in “Self Respect.” Or in “We’re Gonna Know Each Other Forever,” when the line “Does anyone leave their hometown and actually survive….Too dumb to realize how much you meant to this place” really got to me as a 20-something preparing to leave her hometown.

Then, “Isimo” tells a story of perseverance and finding strength in the face of hardship, particularly at a young age: “You were born to bleed, little soldier,” Antonoff sings. He’s been open about losing his little sister to brain cancer when she was 13, and how his sadness inspired him to form Bleachers and write hopeful music embracing grief as an act of love. With this song, and the new album as a whole, I remembered why I admire Jack Antonoff and fell in love with his band, because of this inspiring message, because like a great artist, he turned his pain into art.

But again, I may be biased.