When American Football reunited in 2014, they had to strike through certain milestones. First: a fan service comeback album that met the moment, inched the band’s sound forward, but largely stuck to the coveted LP1 format that was resonating more than ever. That’s LP2. The band ventured inside the Urbana, Illinois, student house/place of worship for the cover shot, but tellingly didn’t have the mettle to leave the premises.
Despite the fanbase’s approval, the band perhaps started to catch heat over playing it safe, so they moved to assert their credibility and converse with the mainstream emo/post-Hot Topic crowd as well as in-vogue emotion-forward music more generally. Bringing on Hayley Williams, Land of Talk’s Elizabeth Powell, and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell to guest on LP3 did the trick there, as did covering Mazzy Star soon after. Instead of “Steve Reich but on guitars”—LP1’s well-documented M.O.—LP3 brought things full circle to, at times, pretty much just Steve Reich, exploding their historically limited guitar-guitar-drums palette with glassy vibraphones and magnificent choral vocal layers.
Then, in 2020, American Football had to split up again and eventually return with a fresh resolve and love. That would’ve been the by-the-numbers biopic angle, but the band had its biopic moment already—when a throwaway teenage project helped invent a genre movement, created cult heroes, and pulled 2/3 of the band members out of day jobs (Kinsella has been making music as Owen ever since American Football split up). And it’s not just that: any fan knows by now that things are never neat and rosy for American Football. The apocalyptic, blood-red sky on the cover of the new album confirms this, too.
“The story of my life is in disarray / It’s written in ink that never dries / What a mess I’ve made,” Kinsella sings on “Blood On My Blood.” The song features Caithlin De Marrais of the brilliant, underrated emo band Rainer Maria, for which Kinsella used to sling merch on the road—one of many ways in which American Football brings with it a history that has been recontextualized and renewed. Marrais doesn’t wail her guts out as she did on Look Now Look Again, but solicitously, ethereally fills in the gaps. That lyric above is one of countless times on the record where Kinsella jabs himself in the ribs or the eye or anywhere he can with his words. But perhaps there are benefits of wet ink: the story, though smudged, can continue advancing across the page. It isn’t formalized in stone, in the past, or in a confusing, nihilistic bardo. It’s like that quote from Grayson Haver Currin’s recent dishy, novella-length GQ profile: “In disappearing, American Football had existed as a perfect, phantom idea; in reappearing, they had to reckon with their own accumulating flaws, to figure them out in order to go forward.”
Seven years after the last record, this is the space LP4 both writhes and grooves in. American Football can’t help but turn their disgust at their own flaws into some of the most impressive, progressive, winding, melody-rich songs of their career. Half-familiar flavors of the Cure, Steve Reich, Mazzy Star, West African rhythms/percussion, and funereal fanfares filter through arena-rock textures, baroque-pop grandeur, and twee-pop playfulness. It’s a difficult record, to be sure; made in the midst of two members’ divorces, familial pressures, alcoholism for some, sobriety for others, and alarmingly bleak discussions of lost hope and rock bottom. At the same time, LP4 adds water back onto the canvas to reshape the colors—sonically and thematically. Long gone are the days of a band having to build on the legacy of LP1 or else pivot to outrun it. Here, they use the framework at their disposal to outgrow everything. This is the record that makes the most sense for American Football. The record they had to make to survive.
Another pertinent quote from that GQ profile—Kinsella’s words this time—“I could write the best emo album ever.” He’s always spoken in interviews with a cheeky self-awareness that belies the intensity of his work. LP4 doesn’t take the easy route, though it knows it could. It crams dozens of new references into every corner—from the gothic gongs and bongs of a Disintegration soundscape to pizzicato violins and The Edge-esque guitar pirouettes, all of which get space alongside the awkwardly-tuned, pretty playing Kinsella and Steve Holmes pioneered, as well as the grooviest beats Steve Lamos has ever crafted. More than that, it has a shocking amount of painful admissions; in some ways, the West End Girl of the emo world (sans butt plugs). At times, these feel tired and done-to-death: Kinsella’s bones ache to be buried on “No Feeling.” “Man Overboard” loops the boringly pessimistic refrain of “Man overboard / It’s hopeless”—two opening tracks that fail to foreshadow the greatness to come.
The eight-minute epic “Bad Moons,” however, unravels lines that will make you hold your breath as it balloons from twilit piano dot-to-dots and a Moon Safari bass groove into a queasy crescendo. “I lost my mind in the dark, told all my lies in the dark / I poured my drinks in the dark, explored new kinks in the dark…,” Kinsella croaks, and continues on like that. The list gets darker, scarier—he slits his wrists in the dark, he doesn’t exist in the dark—and then the music breaks: “‘til I found you in the dark.” Throughout LP4, these flickers of safety halt the spiraling darkness, often unexpectedly. Sometimes it’s the voice of “you”—his partner Justine Fallon sings on several tracks—a kind, whispery coo to undercut a slurred recrimination from her boyfriend. Sometimes it’s a big, starry major chord to break a cycle: the “Stay Home” theory. Sometimes it’s a whole song.
“Patron Saint of Pale” is the most outwardly friendly, not to mention one of the coolest, songs American Football have ever managed. It’s anchored by a strange little recurring hook of “Let’s play Rochambeau / One, two, three, throw!”, answered by pat-a-cake hand claps that have it shake out somewhere between The Go! Team and Belle and Sebastian. This is Kinsella applying a perversely oversimple, innocuous tactic (Rochambeau, aka rock-paper-scissors) to an impossible situation—divorcing the mother of his children—like when Mark Corrigan flips a coin to decide if he should go ahead with his loveless marriage in Peep Show. There are a million tiny things going on as Kinsella agonizes over the predicament—childlike backing vocals, glockenspiel clunks, intrusive, apparently accidental growls of distortion—as if emulating day-to-day interruptions and delays. And yet it all jumbles along, not quite happy and breezy, but not far off. The stunning, rollicking guitar part in the outro recalls “Honestly?,” unfolding like it’s laying a train track in front of itself while in motion. I guess that’s what American Football have been doing this whole time.
“Wake Her Up” will delight lifer fans even as the band massively expands on what we thought it was capable of, patchworking all its influences and more into this fucked-up, intriguing love song. It dances circuitously from icicle arpeggios over uneven snares to a gossamer outro of trumpets and whispers. But in between are woozy, flangey guitars tumbling on top of each other, and others that fizz in the red, blowing the arrangement off its axis. There are multiple stops and starts; hand claps and dreamy backing vocals; and lines of pure, chest-aching poetry snuck in like it’s nothing: “Your daughter’s not dead, she’s just asleep / For hours on end / For days / For forever she dreams.” It’s the highlight of the album.
“Lullaybye,” meanwhile, is a drop-tuned interlude of quiet snare pitter-patters and wincing trumpet that perfectly sets up “No Soul to Save,” the closer. This final track has the requisite lassoing guitar lines and unevenly shuffling drums, all sighing and major-key like the old days—but also not. It’s bigger and more confident, like the prize for sticking with them. Kinsella’s lyrics tell us that he’s fearless, unafraid—he hasn’t even got a soul anymore, so why would he be? You might read this as hopelessly nihilistic, like “Man Overboard” seemed earlier, but I sense a freedom in it this time. Maybe, eventually, a happiness too. “I wasn’t meant to live on a stage,” he sings, cutting himself some slack, reminding us that American Football was never meant to happen.
Parenting, alcoholism, divorce, starting over in your late forties—LP4 makes “Never Meant” sound like blink-182. Heck, it makes LP3 sound like LP1. The stakes are so much higher than they were in 1999. In some ways, it’ll be a surprise if these songs translate or resonate at all. This is so far from the fleeting, college-era lovesickness that first defined American Football. Everything feels far more permanent, or it should feel permanent these days—that’s why Kinsella laments the never-drying ink in which his story is written, the tangled mess he’s made of things, the death of his soul.
But the absence of a soul—of self-expectations, self-belief, self-love—is a kind of liberating permanence in itself, allowing for the free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness experimentation across the record and throughout the autumn of Kinsella’s career. The grittiness, the growing-with-you, the true-to-life is what makes these songs translate and resonate. Breaking from their previous ways, LP4 isn’t rushed. It isn’t a career-first move. It’s the exhausting process of pulling an increasingly gangly, weighed-down operation of middle-aged divorcees onto a new path. I’m not the first to muse on whether three college kids sold their souls in Urbana circa 1999—to become one of the most influential, iconic alternative bands of all time, you must endure a seemingly never-ending barrage of misfortune in return. Sometimes, it seems like American Football was never meant to happen. But LP4 sounds like it was meant to happen—had to happen. It’s what will finally set this band free. [Polyvinyl]
Hayden Merrick is a London-based music journalist and Features Editor at The Line of Best Fit. He also writes for Bandcamp Daily, FLOOD, and others.
