Jack Antonoff is everywhere, all of the time, and some would argue he makes everything sound the same. The musical artist and producer’s omnipresence upsets some people, and it has inspired many analyses, one of which went viral this year. In an essay for The Drift called “Dream of Antonoffication,” writer Mitch Therieau dismissed the Bleachers leader as “music’s blandest prophet,” summing up his work with lines like this: “Antonoff’s hollow maximalism is the empty bigness, the simultaneously brash and ignorable ubiquity, of pop music itself in the age of streaming.” He did, however, like Norman Fucking Rockwell!, the Antonoff-produced Lana Del Rey album that was widely anointed as one of the best albums of 2019.

In a new interview with The Face, Antonoff addresses that takedown essay for the first time. “Those lit people always have a hard time with me because I live in their area in Brooklyn – they can’t figure out where to put me and how to do it,” he says. “I almost feel like that community got real mad after Norman because they’re like, ​’Oh, we like this.'” Maybe I’m not for them to cover. Maybe they’re better off just sitting down with David Byrne – God bless him, of course.” He later adds, “I do think that there’s a misconception about what I do and what pop music is. There’s a certain group of people who think it’s about appealing to the masses, [which is] not how I feel. I’ve never made anything hoping that everyone would like it.”

In the feature, Antonoff reveals LDR will be on the still-unnamed upcoming Bleachers album, the project’s first for Dirty Hit, which includes the recently released “Modern Girl.” There’s also an unreleased track called “Art Bro,” which seems to be a roast of the sort of the people who like to talk shit about Jack Antonoff.

And while we’re discussing the Antonoff x Del Rey connection: Antonoff showed up during Lana’s set at the All Things Go festival Sunday to perform “Margaret” (their tribute to Antonoff’s wife Margaret Qualley, performed for the first time during an LDR live set) and “Venice Bitch” (the best song from the aforementioned NFR!, vociferously praised in that takedown essay). Watch footage of his guest spots below.