He wants to get better, better, better!
Jack Antonoff announced this week that he has rerecorded his debut Bleachers album, Strange Desire, for its 10th anniversary.
First released in July 2014, the album—best known for its lead single, “I Wanna Get Better,” the Jersey-born band’s first No. 1 hit—arose during a “rough time with the full armor of sonic chaos. Voices fluttering around me, hotel room walls echoing in the vocal takes,” Antonoff wrote on Instagram. “[…] It was the sound that I called Bleachers. That feeling of being there but in no way at the center. Watching and dreaming. Shouting from a corner. In the shadow. I wrote from that misunderstood place and I still do.”
Bleachers’ debut album, Strange Desire, came out a decade ago this July.
The Bergen County-raised producer and musician, 40, who often waxes poetic about his native New Jersey sitting in the “shadow” of neighboring Manhattan, explained that the album will feature “all eleven tracks reimagined without the armor I needed” a decade ago.
“Anytime you put out an album, you’re trying to give more context to people; give them as much of who you are in that moment,” Antonoff told NJM earlier this year.
The project’s slightly altered title—A Stranger Desired—is a nod to the audience his band has built in the years since: “It wasn’t only a strange desire to write these songs,” Antonoff reflected in the post. “There was something unknown to me happening. I was looking for you: my people.”
Bleachers’ A Stranger Desired is out September 6.
Those strangers have showed up in droves to Bleachers’ 2024 international tour, which kicked off days after the band released a self-titled fourth album in March. It played Antonoff’s sold-out Shadow of the City festival at the Stone Pony Summer Stage last month, and is currently slated to conclude at Madison Square Garden in October.
The announcement comes after Antonoff’s work on several rerecorded albums with his longtime collaborator and close friend Taylor Swift.
The first song on A Stranger Desired will be released August 2. The full album is out September 6.
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