BLEACHERS Vinilo y CD

Review: Bleachers return with their self-titled new album, released via Dirty Hit. Following up their debut album Strange Desire in 2014, the band are seen to continue building on a huge, passionate following across three studio albums, renowned for their impressive live show and infectious camaraderie. There's a rich depth to the sound on Bleachers, laid out in bright, soulful technicolour. The album is frontman Antonoff's distinctly New Jersey take on the bizarre sensory contradictions of modern life, on his position in culture, and the things he cares about. 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 something reassuringly touchable and concrete about its sentiment: exist in crazy times but remember what counts.

Review: Jack Antonoff's Bleachers project - official stage name for him and accompanying players - made a big impact with 2014's debut single, 'I Wanna Get Better', and continued to pull in followers across three albums, offering equal parts contemporaneity and nostalgia on record(s). Inspired by alternative, light, and pop rock of the late-1980s and early-1990s, there's more than a sense of reflecting on life's great moments about the band, and their fourth LP is exemplary of this. Rousing choruses on big hitters like 'Isimo', 'I Am Right On Time', and 'Tiny Moves' invoke a sense of real togetherness, while saxophones on several songs are deliberate reminders of John Hughes movie scores, and specifically Rob Lowe's downtrodden character in St Elmo's Fire, a prototype for the perpetually adolescent adults that now dominate the millennial generation. Other moments take things down to a more focused and intimate level, 'Hey Joe' and 'Woke Up Today', for example.