JACK ANTONOFF
STILL NEEDS A BAND
Bleachers. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Bleachers will be in Austin this weekend for Austin City Limits Music Festival, bringing the band to Zilker Park as part of ACL’s Weekend One lineup, October 2–4.
BROOKLYN | TMN Editorial
Jack Antonoff was 14 when he started playing shows in New Jersey fire halls and VFW halls. His band, Outline, booked its own dates using a directory called Book Your Own Fucking Life, piled into his family’s minivan and spent years on the road. While bands across the Hudson were playing Manhattan clubs, Antonoff and his friends had little interest in joining that world.
“We were from another planet,” he remembers.
More than two decades later, the circumstances are very different. Antonoff has become one of the most successful songwriters and producers of his generation, while Bleachers has gone from clubs to Madison Square Garden. But listening to him talk about the band, the connection between those two periods is surprisingly direct.
Bleachers began in 2013, just as Antonoff’s career as a songwriter and producer was taking off. Success in that part of his life didn’t settle him. It made him anxious.
“To this day, I love working with people on songs, but once again, that’s just part of what I do,” he says.
Starting Bleachers gave him something else: his own songs, his own band and eventually an audience that developed alongside them. Their 2014 debut, Strange Desire, was partly recorded in hotel rooms while Antonoff was still touring with Fun. In the years since, the project has grown without completely shedding the New Jersey identity that shaped his earliest bands. Bruce Springsteen eventually appeared on a Bleachers record, a particularly neat circle for an artist who now talks about carrying the torch for a New Jersey sound he believes is instantly recognizable but rarely named.
That relationship with the audience continues on the road in 2026. Bleachers’ current run, From the Studio to the Stage, includes two appearances at Austin City Limits Music Festival, with the band playing Weekend One on October 3 and returning to Zilker Park on October 10 for Weekend Two.
That history runs through Everyone For Ten Minutes, Bleachers’ fifth album. On “We Should Talk,” Antonoff goes all the way back to those early touring years: a van, a band and the feeling that they were building their own world. He calls the song “the core” of his creative work.
The album moves through marriage, grief, death and generational divides, but Antonoff describes it as optimistic. Musically, it moves too: folk rock, pop-soul, saxophones and the New Jersey sound he has spent years pulling into Bleachers.
What seems to matter most to him, though, is what happens once those songs leave the studio.
Antonoff describes Bleachers’ audience as a family, one that has grown with the band rather than simply gathered around it. He rejects the idea that people come to Bleachers because of the records he has produced for other artists. To him, the band has developed its own culture, with its own jokes, art and shared history.
“You wouldn’t come to a Bleachers show because you liked an album I produced for someone else,” he says. “It’s such a culture and such a scene.”
That distinction matters. Antonoff could have stopped needing a band a long time ago. Instead, Bleachers has become the part of his career that most closely resembles where he started: writing personal songs, taking them on the road and seeing what happens when the same people keep coming back.
This weekend, that road brings Bleachers to Austin City Limits.
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