- 2024-03-12
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MUSIC
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Donate to support families affected by the crisis in Ukraine ➔ Bleachers Releases New Self-Titled Album
American rock band Bleachers, consisting of Jack Antonoff (lead vocals/guitar/bass/keyboards), Evan Smith (keyboards), Mikey Freedom Hart (guitar), Sean Hutchinson (drums), Mike Riddleberger (drums) and Zem Audu (keyboards/saxophone), released their self-titled fourth studio album on March 8, 2024.
It is their first album in three years since the 2021 album “Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night”.
Also, the album is the first release under their new label Dirty Hit and their own lebale Bleachers Band Recordings.
The album comprises a 14-track, produced by Jack Antonoff, Lana Del Rey, Patrik Berger, Bartees Strange, Mikey Hart, and Sounwave.
The album reflects the band founder Jack Antonoff's personal experiences, having influenced by the death of his sister, bad relationship experiences, childhood trauma, and his relationship with his wife.
Jack Antonoff told Billboard Philippines about the album, “In my past three albums, I felt very obsessed with the past and the future. I was deeply imagining things from before and things that could happen. But somewhere along the way, I just started only thinking about right now. This album feels like you're sitting in a room with me right now. It's definitely a new time for Bleachers because it feels like, things are really present, and that things are exciting and opening up for us.”- He continued, “There's always a fear in me that makes me want to make an album. I find myself scared of what was going to happen in my life, of who I would be, and where I would go. On this album, I felt really, really terrified to enter a new phase of my life and also scared that it would mean that I wouldn't be able to take the people who I've lost with me. Which isn't true [of course], because you can take them with you and still grow. But really, this record is all about overcoming that fear.”
He added, “I hope it does what it did for me and for some other people. Because every record feels like it saves my life. Every album that I make feels like I couldn't have existed without it. So I see the albums as little messages in a bottle for whoever needs it, and I think whoever needs it - I hope they find it.” - Jack Antonoff shared on social media, “This one is for the lonely, the tired on a wire, the born strange desired. For my band and crew who have been with me from the start. For all the steel train people who let me sleep at their parents house. For the bleachers people who would let me sleep over. For my sister Sarah who didn't get to be around past 13 but would have loved all this music more than anyone.”
Jack Antonoff explained about some tracks for the album.
“Modern Girl” via BBC Radio 1
“The first thing I thought we just said is a lot of times people discuss the cinematic quality of things I do. And I think that that comes from having a very growing up in a very unsystematic place like I grew up in suburban New Jersey and so there's a lot of like, dreaming about the city and dreaming about the night dreaming about what people do and and so there's that's always listed into my music like this like kind of aspirational thing.
But it didn't get that because there is a party quality to it. Like this is the band as you know, I've had many bands in my life and maybe one out of my two albums and they usually kind of fall apart. So to kind of goes beyond that a really interesting thing happens which is the band itself becomes the reference point. So like that song is not only is like packed with like inside jokes and lyrics, but the sound of it. It's just like, it is that sound of us on tour.”
“Alma Mater”
“Sometimes you want people to feel like something almost sounds unattainable, and sometimes you want people to feel like they're just in a room with you. And so if I want it to feel like I'm just talking to someone or we're in a room together, then I like to add things like random scratch takes or noises that remind you that you're not in a heightened environment. A song like this, I want it to be like I'm sitting on your basement floor with you.”
“Tiny Moves” via Vulture
“There's a song called 'Tiny Moves,' which no one's heard yet. The real story there is I started writing music when I was 14 or 15, and my younger sister was sickSarah Antonoff had brain cancer. then. She died when I was 18, so all my formative experiences with writing music were writing about this massive, heavy, big loss and grief. Then, obviously, that grief grows and changes. It's such a fertile place to write from, and I'd felt a little bit resigned, not in a comfortable way, just like, Okay, my place in life as a writer is to write about loss through the lens of age. And don't get me wrong, there's tons of that on this album. But I met my now-wife, and it feels like a lot of the mythology and armor that I wore — we all say, like, 'I can't get relationships right,' 'I don't do this,' 'I'm bad at this.' And when you have a big shift like that, which was really meeting my person, it's brilliant and amazing, but it's also destabilizing 'cause you have to deal with all of the past, where you lived by this code that was bullshit. And within that, I found myself writing more conversationally, very deep and very intense. How do you have such a great loss and then also explore other parts of life? I wasn't able to do that in the past, because I felt like it was not honoring my loss to write about anything else. So, this is the first album where I explore other things, and there's presence to it that I haven't had.”
“Isimo” via Apple Music
“I see marriage and partnership in a very intense way. It's easy to share the fun stuff with someone, but will you share the really ugly parts of yourself? It's not an attractive part of myself; I can spin an attractive concept that sounds poetic about someone dealing with grief, but the day-to-day of that is not fun and attractive. I wanted to celebrate that in that song.” - source : Apple Music
