Few 21st century artists have had the cultural impact of Jack Antonoff. Through his work as a producer for artists like Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift, The 1975 and Lorde, he’s won eight Grammys to date and filled album of the year lists with records like Norman Fucking Rockwell! and Folklore. For years critics have wondered how his work is so successful and what defines it when it doesn’t quite sound like anything else (Antonoff ignores what’s on trend, even when that’s his last project). His methodology, he reveals, is the same for his production work as it is for writing his music with Bleachers: “The great journey and struggle of creating your sound is to drill further and further into it, while the whole time shocking yourself and the people around you.” The results are always intimate, confessional and unwaveringly tasteful. Formed as a secret in 2013, Antonoff sought to use Bleachers as a continuation of his life-long need to write and perform his songs with a band. The first three Bleachers albums—2014’s Strange Desire, 2017’s Gone Now and 2021’s Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night—were written through the lens of the loss of his younger sister in 2001. “I do think things happen to people, especially if they’re writers, where it just becomes the starting point for their perspective,” he explains. “I don’t mind that, I like that. Because, the songs I wrote through that lens two years after she died, are very different from the songs I wrote five years later, let alone 10 years. The lens changes wildly.” Fourth album, Bleachers, Bleachers first since signing to iconic indie label Dirty Hit, began as a set-piece on the idea of tribute living. “It’s not regressive. If anything, it’s the opposite,” says Antonoff. “If anything, this concept of tribute living makes you want to fly into the future so hard, because someone else couldn’t.” But his personal and professional life began to hit an apex of hope as he began writing this album in 2022: he met the love of his life and now wife, and Bleachers were playing to bigger crowds, still young enough to find it exciting and old enough to be a band that’s as worn-in and emotionally dedicated as a marriage. “It just felt like all of a sudden this world was opening up on both sides. Often things happen in your personal life, or things happen with the band, but to have them so extremely connected in this big new future felt pretty heavy and exactly what I’ve been banging on about on a lot of the past records,” he says. While this move away from seeing the world explicitly through the loss of his sister is something he on occasion feels guilty about, it is, in fact, the very meaning of tribute living. From triumphant lead single “Modern Girl”, the album’s methodology is laid out in bright soulful technicolour: this is Antonoff’s distinctly New Jersey take on the bizarre sensory contradictions of modern life, on his position in culture—or at the very least opinions on that (“pop music hoarder”)—and on the things he cares about, namely the band and its individual members. In the mix, each instrument is heard for its idiosyncrasies and the personality of the player behind it; sonically it’s sad, it’s joyful, it’s music for driving on the highway to, for crying to and for dancing to at weddings. There’s a rich depth to the band’s sound here, one that Antonoff notes is legitimised by their secret presence everywhere: they’re the band on the last six Taylor Swift albums, the last three Lana Del Rey albums and last two St. Vincent albums. “The band has become characters you’re hearing all over the world. That’s not really a story anyone’s ever told, but it’s a cool one when you think about it,” he says, adding that, “It’s a very rare thing for a band to really be a band. And it takes a really long time.” Bleachers is self-titled because for the first time the reference point for the band is the band itself. For Antonoff, this decision was akin to planting a flag of what the band is at its core. Matching that lived-in feeling across the album, there’s a comfiness and a taking stock with regards to Antonoff’s personal life. On the gentle 80s-inflected love song “Tiny Moves”, Antonoff articulates that feeling of watching someone you adore when every little move they make is “earth-shattering” to you. “I barely remember writing it. I more remember trancing around the room celebrating that it existed,” he says of its creation. “Me Before You” is another “line in the sand” that he couldn’t have written before this record. Of his previous emotional unavailability as explored in this simplistic and touching track, he says, “I listen to my podcasts. I don’t like anyone in my bed. We all know how that goes. Maybe those are just weird systems of armour that we just wear when we’re not ready or we don’t have the outlet.” Elsewhere, with soft and pleasingly one-tone vocals on indie synth-pop “Jesus Is Dead”, he names what he needs in life. It was inspired by a time he was sick with Covid and enjoying languishing with his partner, watching Phantom Thread. He considered that all that truly mattered to him could be written on a piece of paper: his family, friends, wife, band, audience and the drive to do some good along the way with the non-profit he runs with his family, the Ally Coalition, which supports organisations in championing LGBTQ youth. ““Jesus is dead” is almost like this protective shield, ‘this is where ‘I’m at’. If that’s not enough for someone, then they need not be in this audience or in this conversation.” Long-time collaborator Del Rey joins him on “Alma Mater”; a sprawling, uncategorizable mood of a song written in some downtime messing around when they were working on her music. They were making each other laugh, singing lines to each other (“‘She’s my alma mater / fuck Balenciaga”) and the result is a pensive but spritely and dynamic surprise. “This song is a weird little magic gem where I’m not really sure why all the pieces are coming together, but they are in this really special way to me,” he notes. Rousing anthem “Self Respect” is a different prospect altogether, emerging from Antonoff’s exhaustion at feeling he has to be perfect in his personal life. It pins together different events from across time and space: the profundity of his sister’s death, the strange biblical nature of Kobe Bryant’s death, the idiocy of Kendall Jenner in that Pepsi commercial. “Why did Kobe Bryant die? Why did my sister die? Why did Kendall Jenner make that commercial? The way the human brain thinks, not every question is perfectly sewed together. I’m not only thinking about deep things. I’m not only thinking about silly things. It’s all happening at once,” he says. But, as explored in Joan Didion’s infamous essay, self respect evokes confronting feelings in an individual, despite all its mundanity and overuse. “Ironically, most people’s definition of self-respect is an outward one,” he says. “It’s such a widely commented on concept that it becomes almost impossible to have your own idea of it, which is so horrible because the whole point is that it’s this personal thing. But as wellness, self-respect, -love, -care, all these things become popular, the natural thing to happen is for them to become debased.” As Bleachers dances with all these big collective ideas and small, interior ones, it maintains a proud New Jersey sensibility. Born, raised and now based in the Garden State, Antonoff (who is by necessity a devotee of Bruce Springsteen) says that its sound, “to literally articulate it, is: so sad, so hopeful, so aspirational, so broken all at once.” It’s gang vocals, twinkling glockenspiels, brief sax solos and the soundtrack to driving into the sunset heartbroken but at the centre of your own universe. He chooses to lyrically embed his grief and sarcasm within the broad, embraceable sonics, reporting from his geographical home because his personhood and place are inexplicably entwined for him. Even without being a pre-existing Bleachers fan who understands all the references and in-jokes knitted into the fabric of Bleachers, there’s something reassuringly touchable and concrete about its sentiment: exist in crazy times but remember what counts. What Antonoff anticipates now, having successfully shocked himself with Bleachers, is the opportunity to play the first shows of this album run, and shape the feeling of this era for both band and fans from within that live experience. “If you go watch Beyoncé, you’re praying at the altar of Beyoncé. That’s not who I am,” Antonoff concludes. “I always gravitated more towards artists like Paul Simon or Bruce Springsteen; just people who looked like me and felt like me, but had this weird thing they could do that could bring people together. Some people like to be witnessed. I don’t like to be witnessed. I like to be a part of something.” Few 21st century artists have had the cultural impact of Jack Antonoff. Through his work as a producer for artists like Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift, The 1975 and Lorde, he’s won eight Grammys to date and filled album of the year lists with records like Norman Fucking Rockwell! and Folklore. For years critics have wondered how his work is so successful and what defines it when it doesn’t quite sound like anything else (Antonoff ignores what’s on trend, even when that’s his last project). His methodology, he reveals, is the same for his production work as it is for writing his music with Bleachers: “The great journey and struggle of creating your sound is to drill further and further into it, while the whole time shocking yourself and the people around you.” The results are always intimate, confessional and unwaveringly tasteful. Formed as a secret in 2013, Antonoff sought to use Bleachers as a continuation of his life-long need to write and perform his songs with a band. The first three Bleachers albums—2014’s Strange Desire, 2017’s Gone Now and 2021’s Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night—were written through the lens of the loss of his younger sister in 2001. “I do think things happen to people, especially if they’re writers, where it just becomes the starting point for their perspective,” he explains. “I don’t mind that, I like that. Because, the songs I wrote through that lens two years after she died, are very different from the songs I wrote five years later, let alone 10 years. The lens changes wildly.” Fourth album, Bleachers, Bleachers first since signing to iconic indie label Dirty Hit, began as a set-piece on the idea of tribute living. “It’s not regressive. If anything, it’s the opposite,” says Antonoff. “If anything, this concept of tribute living makes you want to fly into the future so hard, because someone else couldn’t.” But his personal and professional life began to hit an apex of hope as he began writing this album in 2022: he met the love of his life and now wife, and Bleachers were playing to bigger crowds, still young enough to find it exciting and old enough to be a band that’s as worn-in and emotionally dedicated as a marriage. “It just felt like all of a sudden this world was opening up on both sides. Often things happen in your personal life, or things happen with the band, but to have them so extremely connected in this big new future felt pretty heavy and exactly what I’ve been banging on about on a lot of the past records,” he says. While this move away from seeing the world explicitly through the loss of his sister is something he on occasion feels guilty about, it is, in fact, the very meaning of tribute living. From triumphant lead single “Modern Girl”, the album’s methodology is laid out in bright soulful technicolour: this is Antonoff’s distinctly New Jersey take on the bizarre sensory contradictions of modern life, on his position in culture—or at the very least opinions on that (“pop music hoarder”)—and on the things he cares about, namely the band and its individual members. In the mix, each instrument is heard for its idiosyncrasies and the personality of the player behind it; sonically it’s sad, it’s joyful, it’s music for driving on the highway to, for crying to and for dancing to at weddings. There’s a rich depth to the band’s sound here, one that Antonoff notes is legitimised by their secret presence everywhere: they’re the band on the last six Taylor Swift albums, the last three Lana Del Rey albums and last two St. Vincent albums. “The band has become characters you’re hearing all over the world. That’s not really a story anyone’s ever told, but it’s a cool one when you think about it,” he says, adding that, “It’s a very rare thing for a band to really be a band. And it takes a really long time.” Bleachers is self-titled because for the first time the reference point for the band is the band itself. For Antonoff, this decision was akin to planting a flag of what the band is at its core. Matching that lived-in feeling across the album, there’s a comfiness and a taking stock with regards to Antonoff’s personal life. On the gentle 80s-inflected love song “Tiny Moves”, Antonoff articulates that feeling of watching someone you adore when every little move they make is “earth-shattering” to you. “I barely remember writing it. I more remember trancing around the room celebrating that it existed,” he says of its creation. “Me Before You” is another “line in the sand” that he couldn’t have written before this record. Of his previous emotional unavailability as explored in this simplistic and touching track, he says, “I listen to my podcasts. I don’t like anyone in my bed. We all know how that goes. Maybe those are just weird systems of armour that we just wear when we’re not ready or we don’t have the outlet.” Elsewhere, with soft and pleasingly one-tone vocals on indie synth-pop “Jesus Is Dead”, he names what he needs in life. It was inspired by a time he was sick with Covid and enjoying languishing with his partner, watching Phantom Thread. He considered that all that truly mattered to him could be written on a piece of paper: his family, friends, wife, band, audience and the drive to do some good along the way with the non-profit he runs with his family, the Ally Coalition, which supports organisations in championing LGBTQ youth. ““Jesus is dead” is almost like this protective shield, ‘this is where ‘I’m at’. If that’s not enough for someone, then they need not be in this audience or in this conversation.” Long-time collaborator Del Rey joins him on “Alma Mater”; a sprawling, uncategorizable mood of a song written in some downtime messing around when they were working on her music. They were making each other laugh, singing lines to each other (“‘She’s my alma mater / fuck Balenciaga”) and the result is a pensive but spritely and dynamic surprise. “This song is a weird little magic gem where I’m not really sure why all the pieces are coming together, but they are in this really special way to me,” he notes. Rousing anthem “Self Respect” is a different prospect altogether, emerging from Antonoff’s exhaustion at feeling he has to be perfect in his personal life. It pins together different events from across time and space: the profundity of his sister’s death, the strange biblical nature of Kobe Bryant’s death, the idiocy of Kendall Jenner in that Pepsi commercial. “Why did Kobe Bryant die? Why did my sister die? Why did Kendall Jenner make that commercial? The way the human brain thinks, not every question is perfectly sewed together. I’m not only thinking about deep things. I’m not only thinking about silly things. It’s all happening at once,” he says. But, as explored in Joan Didion’s infamous essay, self respect evokes confronting feelings in an individual, despite all its mundanity and overuse. “Ironically, most people’s definition of self-respect is an outward one,” he says. “It’s such a widely commented on concept that it becomes almost impossible to have your own idea of it, which is so horrible because the whole point is that it’s this personal thing. But as wellness, self-respect, -love, -care, all these things become popular, the natural thing to happen is for them to become debased.” As Bleachers dances with all these big collective ideas and small, interior ones, it maintains a proud New Jersey sensibility. Born, raised and now based in the Garden State, Antonoff (who is by necessity a devotee of Bruce Springsteen) says that its sound, “to literally articulate it, is: so sad, so hopeful, so aspirational, so broken all at once.” It’s gang vocals, twinkling glockenspiels, brief sax solos and the soundtrack to driving into the sunset heartbroken but at the centre of your own universe. He chooses to lyrically embed his grief and sarcasm within the broad, embraceable sonics, reporting from his geographical home because his personhood and place are inexplicably entwined for him. Even without being a pre-existing Bleachers fan who understands all the references and in-jokes knitted into the fabric of Bleachers, there’s something reassuringly touchable and concrete about its sentiment: exist in crazy times but remember what counts. What Antonoff anticipates now, having successfully shocked himself with Bleachers, is the opportunity to play the first shows of this album run, and shape the feeling of this era for both band and fans from within that live experience. “If you go watch Beyoncé, you’re praying at the altar of Beyoncé. That’s not who I am,” Antonoff concludes. “I always gravitated more towards artists like Paul Simon or Bruce Springsteen; just people who looked like me and felt like me, but had this weird thing they could do that could bring people together. Some people like to be witnessed. I don’t like to be witnessed. I like to be a part of something.”

Mannequin Pussy’s music feels like a resilient and galvanizing shout that demands to be heard. Across four albums, the Philadelphia rock band that consists of Colins “Bear” Regisford (bass, vocals), Kaleen Reading (drums, percussion), Maxine Steen (guitar, synths), and Marisa Dabice (guitar, vocals) has made cathartic tunes about despairing times. “There's just so much constantly going on that feels intentionally evil that trying to make something beautiful feels like a radical act ,” says Dabice. “The ethos of this band has always been to bring people together.” Their latest I Got Heaven, which is out March 1 via Epitaph Records, is the band’s most fully realized LP yet. Over 10 ambitious tracks which abruptly turn from searing punk to inviting pop, the album is deeply concerned with desire, the power in being alone, and how to live in an unfeeling and unkind world. It’s a document of a band doubling down on their unshakable bond to make something furious, thrilling, and wholly alive.

Following the 2019 release of their critically acclaimed third album Patience, Mannequin Pussy returned in 2021 for their EP Perfect. They toured that release relentlessly and added guitarist Maxine Steen to the band’s official lineup. Where the band members’ personal lives were in transition with breakups, changing living situations, and periods of self-reevaluation, their time together on the road was a grounding and clarifying force. “There was so much going on in our lives that it was the perfect opportunity to recalibrate who we were as people and musicians,” says Regisford. The band changed their entire formula, choosing to write together in Los Angeles with producer John Congleton over slowly crafting tracks at home. “When I've written songs, it's usually a very solitary process,” says Dabice. “So this was shedding a lot of those hermit-like qualities to do something intensively collaborative. Your best work comes when you allow other people into it.”

By December 2022, the band had 17 new songs written with Congleton in Los Angeles. “Everyone felt empowered to speak up about their own ideas to make this thing the best it could possibly be,” says Regisford. New member Maxine Steen, who has made music with Dabice for years including their side project Rosie Thorne, was especially essential to the writing sessions. The album opener “I Got Heaven” initially started as one of Steen’s demos. “When she showed it to me I knew it was going to be fun because the verses have this hard-hitting and aggressive approach but the chorus allows for a really soaring melody,” says Dabice. The result is electric. Over walloping guitar riffs, Dabice defiantly yells, “And what if I’m an angel? Oh what if I’m a bore? And what if I was confident would you just hate me more?

The song with its righteous lyrical blending of the sacred and profane is an unapologetic look at Christian hypocrisy. “I don't think there's ever been anything in need of a spiritual revolution more than modern-day Christianity,” says Dabice. “It sickens me the way that people use it as a way to do the worst things imaginable, say the worst things imaginable, and pass the worst imaginable legislation that directly harms people.” Instead of judgment, greed, and avarice, the songs on I Got Heaven ask what it really means to genuinely care about the people around you and help your communities in ways you can. “The world that we live in is heaven,” says Dabice. “We live on the most beautiful planet in the solar system, just by a chance and we are continuingly destroying it.”

This sentiment is mirrored by the album’s cover art: a figure and a pig in nature. There’s an intentional ambiguity there that makes you wonder if this person is leading the animal to slaughter or its protector. “We should really be the shepherds and the protectors of everything that we have and the world we live in,” says Dabice. I Got Heaven is an album that understands the stakes of its message: there are countless references to fire, hunger, and holiness. Here, teeth gnash and bodies are temples that ache with desire. On the yearning single “Nothing Like,” which is anchored by a dancey, shuffling drum beat from Reading, Dabice’s voice eventually morphs from a coo to a roar as she sings, “Oh what’s wrong with dreaming of burning this all down?”

Even when the songs on I Got Heaven don’t deal with fundamental human questions about how to live, Mannequin Pussy still finds ways to add urgency and resonance. Just take the buoyant and playful single “I Don’t Know You,” which slowly builds to a hair-raising peak with Reading’s brushed percussion, Steen’s enveloping synths, and a thoughtful groove from Regisford. “On that song, I changed the tuning last minute which transformed the song but everyone instinctively knew what to do,” says Dabice. “It was really cool to watch a song come alive in real-time. It's such a gift to meet other people who are creatively on the same wavelength as you, where there's no judgment in sharing ideas.”

The lightness of this track pairs perfectly with the rest of the tracklist, even when it’s snarling rock like “Loud Bark” or punishing hardcore punk with Regisford sharing lead vocal duties on “OK? OK! OK? OK!”  “If you're a Mannequin Pussy fan, you know that we're going to have some rippers,” says Regisford. “We're gonna have something that's going to be in your face. But we're also going to give you something that's going to be light to the touch with its own version of aggression.” The loud and uncompromising single “Of Her,” finds Dabice screaming, “I was born / Of her fire / Of sacrifices That were made /  So I could make it.” It’s a song about living life without regrets and understanding the sacrifices that you and your parents, especially your mother, made to allow you to live the life you want.

I Got Heaven is a visceral and stunning album for people who aren’t content with the status quo, made by people who challenged themselves and got out of their comfort zone. ”We're supposed to be living in the freest era ever so what it means to be a young person in this society is the freedom to challenge these systems that have been put on to us,” says Dabice. “It makes sense to ask, what ultimately am I living for? What is it that makes me want to live?”