After building a devoted fan-base through a year and a half of non-stop touring behind his band Bleachers’ well-received debut album Strange Desire, Jack Antonoff realized his second album needed to, “sound like New York and New Jersey and the actual space I grew up in, in the most specific way.” So he built his own studio in his New York apartment and it was there in that room – surrounded by posters and flyers from punk shows he saw as a kid and his old baseball trophies and Star Wars figurines – that Antonoff created the epic, synth-driven anthems that appear on Bleachers’ new album Gone Now.

“The crux of the new album is my desperately trying to find a way to become some version of an adult, and not just be a giant child,” Antonoff explains. “I thought a lot about things like, ‘Where do I want to go from here? Do I want to be a person who has this extremely vibrant relationship with their art, but their life suffers in a million other places? Where do I want to go with my life?'”

Jack sought to answer those questions on every song on the album. On “I Miss Those Days,” he pines for a simpler time when “I knew I was fucked up and didn’t know why I was fucked up,” he says referencing the years he spent as a high-schooler touring with his first punk band. On “Hate That You Know Me” he realizes that when you build a life with someone and make plans for the future, “it makes you really exposed to the ways in which you’re a disaster.”

Then there’s “Let’s Get Married,” which Jack wrote the day after Donald Trump was elected. “Marriage is such a wild, absurd concept, but the world was falling down into flames around my eyes, and I wanted to write this absurd celebration song that could play at weddings for the next hundred years.” And on the album’s first single, “Don’t Take The Money,” Antonoff laments how our society has culturally lost the concept of what selling out means.