Bleachers review — Jack Antonoff’s band blend New York indie-rock with Bruce Springsteen

Last month Jack Antonoff won the Grammy prize for best producer for the third year running. “I love you to death, Taylor,” he said, brandishing the award. (Antonoff has worked with Swift since her 2014 album 1989.) “Lana, wherever you are, I love you so much,” he also declared. (He is Del Rey’s regular producer too.)

Other big-name beneficiaries of his production include Florence + The Machine, The 1975 and Lorde. They went unmentioned in the speech but are no doubt loved from the bottom of his heart as well. Although not all producers follow the same script (Phil Spector pulled a gun on Leonard Cohen), one of the job’s principal roles is to make the talent feel cherished. The best performances are usually coaxed from stars, not coerced.

The new album from Bleachers bears the fruit of Antonoff’s latest production work. It comes with a twist — for Bleachers are his band. Not only has he co-produced their self-titled release, he also performs on it. It’s their fourth album since Antonoff founded the band in 2013. Before then he was in the groups Fun and Steel Train. One of the most successful producers of the present age has an alternative career as an indie musician.

Bleachers positions him as “New Jersey’s finest New Yorker”. The jocular self-description comes in “Modern Girl”, a song that wears its Garden State influences like a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt, all squealing sax and yowls while the titular modern girls party like it’s Asbury Park in 1979. This jeu d’esprit pays tribute to Antonoff’s upbringing in New Jersey. (Springsteen himself turned up on the last Bleachers album.)

New York, where Antonoff lives, brings out the album’s less colourful side. Here we find a particular strand of the city’s indie-rock traditions. Not the loudly dishevelled one that reached a terminus with the trust-fund decadence of The Strokes, but instead the solemn, quasi-literary wing represented by The National.

Antonoff sounds a lot like that band’s Matt Berninger when he portentously intones lines such as “Jesus is dead and so’s New York”. The National’s guitarist Aaron Dessner, also a Taylor Swift collaborator, features on the Lou Reed-adjacent “Hey Joe”. The fastidiously designed but dull “Alma Mater” is unsalvaged by a brief cameo from Lana Del Rey. Songs such as these represent nicely textured but boringly structured exercises in show-don’t-tell. They could do with less coaxing and more drama.

★★☆☆☆

‘Bleachers’ is released by Dirty Hit