Essential Artists: Bleachers

With the beginnings of a lockdown summer creeping in over our garden fences, Bleachers’ discography is the perfect thing to get into as a way of bringing the holiday vibe into the confinements of your house. Bleachers is the side project of prolific songwriter and producer Jack Antonoff, formerly of the bands fun. and Steel Train. In the last year alone, he produced on Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell, Taylor Swift’s Lover and FKA Twigs’ Magdalene, having also worked with the likes of Troye Sivan, Grimes, Dixie Chicks, and a whole host more.

Strange Desire is a fantastic album full of cathartic anthems with the kind of introspection not often granted to poppier music

As of April 2020, Antonoff has only released two albums under the moniker of Bleachers, but each of them are exceptional creations. His debut, Strange Desire, is a fantastic album full of cathartic anthems with the kind of introspection not often granted to poppier music; a particularly impressive feat considering that Antonoff is a somewhat self-confessed loner of a writer. It plays host to clear inspirations from other artists and tracks, from ‘I Melt With You’ by Modern English inspiring ‘Rollercoaster,’ to the Tears for Fears or Duran Duran sounding reassurance of ‘Shadow,’ preaching the message that there’s love out there for all of us, despite any pain we’ve been put through before. ‘I Wanna Get Better’ is beautifully relieving, stuffed from beginning to end with poetic lyrics and a real shout-it-from-the-rooftops melody, mirrored in Antonoff’s own words, ‘So now I’m standing on the overpass screaming at the cars / hey, I wanna get better.’

On this album, Antonoff composes a beautiful balance of these yellable songs with more laid back tracks like ‘Wake Me’ and ‘Reckless Love,’ which explore the record’s theme of self-doubt and self-acceptance in a more melancholic style through an (arguably unhealthy) dependency on another person. The former’s hook line ‘If you’re lonely, lonely, lonely, wake me,’ and the latter’s ‘Get out / Stand back / If you don’t let go you’re gonna break me’ both encompass the narrator’s sense of self in regard to another; whether this is Antonoff as himself or not.

Perhaps my favourite thing about Strange Desire is its added bonuses. A number of songs from this album were used on the soundtrack of Love, Simon (2018), as well as an extra track ‘Alfie’s Song (Not So Typical Love Song),’ written by Antonoff as Bleachers exclusively for the film. Better still, however, is the creation of Terrible Thrills Vol.2, an all-women cover album of Strange Desire featuring the likes of Charli XCX, Tinashe, Carly Rae Jepsen, Sia, and more. Each cover track is very much infused with the artist’s unique sound, but some more so than others; my personal favourite is Lucius’ cover of ‘Wake Me,’ a very ‘60s inspired reimagining of the original Bleachers track. The album is a sequel of a project that began with Antonoff’s former band Steel Train, in which they enlisted some of their favourite female artists to cover their self titled record.

Gone Now is, I dare to argue, an even better album on the whole than Strange Desire

Terrible Thrills Vol.3 was also created for Bleachers’ sophomore album, Gone Now, but was only released as a four-part limited edition vinyl. I cannot express my hope that someday this version will be made available publicly, since Gone Now is, I dare to argue, an even better album on the whole than Strange Desire. Listed as one of Independent’s top 30 albums of 2017, Bleachers’ second album is host to pop-infused belters like ‘Don’t Take The Money’ and ‘Let’s Get Married’, and whilst these tracks are two of my favourite on the Bleachers discography, they barely scratch the surface of what Gone Now really incorporates. Antonoff takes the idea of a concept album further in Gone Now than his first album; the record comes charmingly full circle with the story of Mickey Mantle, from the first track ‘Dream of Mickey Mantle’ to the penultimate ‘I’m Ready To Move On/Mickey Mantle Reprise.’ This is explored additionally in the similarities of ‘Good Morning’ and ‘Goodbye,’ at the beginning and end of the album respectively. The lyrics of the two songs bounce off one another using similar words to connote opposing stories, and work together to create a satisfying sense of closure by the end of the album; ‘Good morning to my upstairs neighbor / And to the kids at forty-two / Anyone who lent me a favour’ in the former to the almost identical ‘Goodbye to my upstairs neighbor / Goodbye to the kids downstairs and / Anybody who lent me a favour’ in the latter. These lyrics are a recurring motif of the album, appearing in one or two tracks other than ‘Good Morning’ and ‘Goodbye,’ and meaning something slightly different each time.

The lyrics of the two songs … work together to create a satisfying sense of closure by the end of the album

In an interview with Pitchfork, Antonoff stated, ‘If I ever work with someone else, all that I think about is: Do you want to make the best album you’ve ever made in your life, or not?’ Whilst I am obviously a fan of the Bleachers side-project, it seems that what Antonoff pushes for in other artists is not necessarily what he’s thinking when creating his own music; there’s something startlingly genuine in his inability to articulate the songs’ meanings in interviews. Writing Bleachers’ music seems to be one of few ways that Antonoff can get his thoughts down coherently, and even then, it takes some real digging to find the source of inspiration sometimes – but this just adds to the charm of it all. He refers to his music as ‘the sound of a person going crazy alone in a room,’ to TIME; Gone Now is largely a focus on mental health, and an exploration of Antonoff’s own baggage, particularly in revisiting his feelings towards his sister’s death which happened when he was eighteen years old. These feelings come through particularly strongly in tracks like ‘Everybody Lost Somebody,’ with the poignant lyric ‘there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to wake up and remember it’ shining through as a painfully relatable message to anyone who’s experienced a significant loss.

Following his previous three-year interval between albums, Antonoff announced a third Bleachers record right on time in January this year via Twitter, and stating even more recently that it’s ‘close.’ He has also released free-to-use samples from his music, available online here. My goal here? To get everyone as excited as I am for its release. If album number three is to be anything like its predecessors, I’m sure we’re in for another no-skips musical masterpiece.