@colekincart (words n’ pics)

This past Friday, Bleachers headlined The Salt Shed for a sold-out show kicking off their Bleachers Forever tour. Tour openers can be strange affairs, honestly. Sometimes it takes bands a few shows to figure things out. A setlist needs tweaking, transitions need tightening, and pacing has to settle into place. Fortunately, those concerns don’t seem to apply to Jack Antonoff and Bleachers. Few artists take live performance as seriously as they do, and if anything, opening night only added to the excitement.

The show felt especially significant for me because Bleachers was the first concert I ever attended, ever! Back in 2014, my dad was kind enough be my “adult chaperone” andweI saw them in a venue that couldn’t have held more than 300 people during the Strange Desire tour. At the time, Bleachers felt like a side project with a lot of promise. Standing in front of a packed Salt Shed more than a decade later, it was hard not to think about everything that’s changed since then, for both the band and myself.

One thing I’ve always appreciated about Bleachers is that their records seem to age alongside their audience. As the albums have grown more reflective, so has life. I don’t listen to Strange Desire the way I did when I was fourteen, but I can still rely on a Bleachers show to deliver that same sense of release.

That showed up in the crowd, too. You had people like myself who grew up on alternative radio in the 2010s, parents with their kids, young couples out for a Friday night, and plenty of people who probably entered through the Taylor Swift-Lorde-Lana-to-Jack Antonoff pipeline. It’s a pretty wide range of people, but Bleachers somehow makes it work.

That same sense of scale carries into the band’s newer material. Everyone for Ten Minutes feels like a continuation of 2024’s self-titled album, with its dense production, black-and-white aesthetic, and larger-than-life arrangements. Live, those songs sit comfortably alongside older material, you know, less like a new era and more like an extension of what Bleachers has always done.

Still, the night belonged to the live show.

At one point, Antonoff mentioned wanting the tour to begin in Chicago. Maybe that’s because Chicago audiences simply get it (we do). As someone who firmly believes Chicago remains one of the best places to live and hear live music, I was happy to hear the sentiment echoed back from the stage.

It also helped that this was one of those genuinely beautiful Chicago summer nights. You know, the kind that makes you forget how last February actually was!

What separates Bleachers from many of their peers is the sense that Antonoff is experiencing the performance alongside the audience, which is unique take but trust me, you’ll understand when you see them live. The journey doesn’t feel rehearsed or predetermined. It feels like something unfolding in real time. You get the sense that he’s taking just as much from the performance as the crowd is. 

The setlist left little room for complaints. Bleachers have quietly built one of the strongest live catalogs in modern pop and alternative music, and they know exactly how to deploy it. The opening run of songs was a reminder of that. “Modern Girl,” “Jesus Is Dead,” and “The Backwards Heart” all landed with enormous energy, while newer material fit seamlessly alongside fan favorites.

Highlights included “Dirty Wedding Dress” and “Sideways,” which was a killer opener—especially with the band walking out to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” before launching into it. It set the tone immediately and never really let go. The rest of the set kept that momentum going, especially through the stretch of classics: “Rollercoaster,” “Don’t Take the Money,” “I Wanna Get Better,” and “How Dare You Want More.” The crowd responded exactly as you’d expect.

I’ve now seen Bleachers in South Dakota, Chicago, and New York, and this might’ve been the best of the bunch. Or maybe it just felt that way because of where I am now, or because it was opening night, or because these songs have a way of collecting different meanings depending on when you catch them.

Either way, it felt good.

Not everyone gets to see their first concert artist still out here doing it ten years on. Even fewer get to catch them right as a tour kicks off, in a city that already feels like it’s halfway through its own story. I’m not sure it needs to mean anything beyond that. Most things don’t, except when everyone decides they do for about ten minutes and then goes back to being normal.