American Football - LP4 [CD]

The quietest voices don’t just endure — sometimes they deepen.

For a band once defined by understatement, American Football has become something increasingly rare: one whose stature has grown less by nostalgia than through patience, self-interrogation and the long view. Since reuniting in 2014 after a decade-plus dormancy, American Football hasn’t simply returned to its past. It has moved forward in parallel with its audience, writing music that reflects the disorientation, compromise, grief and hard-won perspective of middle age.

Its fourth self-titled album (LP4) is the clearest and most satisfying expression of that evolution yet. It’s simultaneously the band’s darkest and most playful, its most complex and — paradoxically — its most generous. Throughout, LP4 stares matter-of-factly at despair while refusing the comforts of melodrama or easy resolution.

Indeed, on “Patron Saint of Pale,” frontman Mike Kinsella proposes playing Rock Paper Scissors with his soon-to-be ex-wife as a way to avoid signing their divorce papers. And on the gripping, eight-minute “Bad Moons,” he jokes about actually being two little kids disguised in a trench coat rather than a flesh-and-blood 40-something dad of two teens, before the reality of the situation can no longer be avoided: “I lost my mind in the dark / I told all my lies in the dark / I poured my drinks in the dark / I explored new kinks in the dark,” he sings, his voice seemingly cracking at times under the cold, hard truths.

“That's the one where I was like, ‘Oh, fuck. My mom's gonna listen to this.’ But I’m proud of it,” Kinsella says. “I think only a grown person would think those things or say those things, and I'm a grown man.” “Those are not funny lyrics,” drummer Steve Lamos adds, “but there’s a weird ‘fuck it’ to the whole thing that I love.”

That restless desire to grow and evolve has guided American Football since its return. The band’s 1999 self-titled debut became a touchstone almost accidentally — a record whose elliptical lyrics and interlocking guitar lines sneakily rewired Midwestern emo and post-rock alike. During the 2014 tour, the quartet was surprised to find itself playing larger rooms than it ever had the first time around. “It felt like stumbling into being a mid-level band without having earned it,” guitarist Steve Holmes says of those first shows back.

But over time, American Football leapfrogged existing as a mere reunion act and instead became a vibrant, ongoing concern. LP2 (2016) and LP3 (2019) documented that transition — the former cautious and connective, the latter expansive, exploratory and welcoming of new voices such as Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell. LP4 completes this arc with one astonishing song after another.

“The charm of the first record is that it could have only been made by kids,” Holmes says. “This record could only have been made by adults. There's a swagger that comes with the confidence of having done this for a long time, and there’s gravitas to Mike's lyrics. There's still breakup and heartbreak in there, but it’s much more real.”

LP4 was initially born out of an interruption. After touring LP3 in 2019,  the band planned a break. The pandemic stretched that pause into a three-year hiatus, during which Lamos, by day a college English professor in Colorado, stepped away for personal and professional reasons. Attempts to write remotely faltered. “It was not easy to do on Zoom,” Holmes admits. “And honestly, it wasn’t clicking.”

In the meantime, Kinsella and his cousin Nate channeled some of that material into an album for their synth-y side project, LIES, sharpening their shared language in the process and beginning the relationship with Sonny DiPerri, who they enlisted to mix. When Lamos returned and the band reconvened in earnest, something shifted. “It felt much more like a band again,” Lamos says. “There was a certain organic piece to this one that harkened back to what I associate with the first record.”

The Kinsellas then suggested recording LP4 in Stinson Beach, Ca., with DiPerri (My Bloody Valentine, Trent Reznor), whose presence proved crucial. “Sonny was a great, calming influence,” Holmes says. “Thanks to his energy and approach, it was easy for me to do what I felt like I needed to do,” Lamos explains. “For me personally as a player, this is maybe the best representation of what I would want to say on the drums.”

American Football also overhauled its process. Nate Kinsella devised an elaborate system of scratch tracks and modular demos, allowing ideas to evolve before the band ever entered the studio, while touring members Cory Bracken and Mike Garzon added the kinds of subtle touches that have made them indispensable onstage. “This record would not exist in the way it does without Nate masterminding a lot of the sonic details,” Holmes says. “He’s our Brian Eno or Jonny Greenwood.”

The result is American Football’s most sonically ambitious album: layered, dissonant, occasionally confrontational and always deeply felt. Piano, vibraphone, synths, trumpet and unexpected harmonic and tonal shifts disrupt the band’s famously smooth surfaces but invite new levels of depth and discovery. “The goal was to make the best record we could possibly make and not worry about how we’re going to recreate it live,” Holmes laughs. “That’s somebody else’s problem — which is currently our problem.”

That ambition is evident immediately. Expansive opener “Man Overboard” is built around a knotty, almost prog-like drum pattern that Lamos admits he had to later relearn. Lyrically, it sets the tone: resignation without self-pity, isolation rendered in stark maritime imagery. “I was born castaway / Lost at sea,” Kinsella sings, before the devastating refrain “Man overboard / It’s hopeless” previews what’s to come.

Across LP4, Kinsella’s narratives are unflinchingly heavy. Suicide, shame, divorce, addiction, self-loathing and rebirth all surface, often within the same song. “If you read the lyrics on the page, they can seem grim,” Holmes says. “But there’s hope in them.”

That tension is central to the album’s emotional arc. “It feels like stages of grief to me,” Lamos offers. “Raging against how things work, and then increasing moments of acceptance as the record goes on.” Mike Kinsella doesn’t frame it so explicitly, but acknowledges the weight. “The goal has always been to say something giant and heavy in a very plain way,” he says. “On this record, I keep things a little more vague — and I think that makes it more honest.”

Songs like “No Feeling” and “No Soul To Save” flirt openly with annihilation, yet the music beneath them is lush, even inviting. “Bad Moons” stitches together two previously unrelated demos into a towering release Holmes describes as “maybe our most cathartic song ever,” while “Desdemona” threads phased, wordless vocals straight out of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians through the kinds of classic American Football guitar lines that still make people cry in bedrooms around the globe (“It's incredible,” Mike Kinsella raves about the musical juxtaposition. “That might actually be my favorite part of the record”).

Guest vocalists further deepen the world of LP4. Longtime peer Caithlin De Marrais of Rainer Maria brings history and familiarity to “Blood on My Blood,” Wisp’s Natalie Lu provides the perfect ethereal contrast on the almost poppy “Wake Her Up” and Turnstile’s Brendan Yates contributes a key vocal harmony on “No Feeling” that was recorded the day after the band casually asked if he’d like to stop by DiPerri’s L.A. studio. Says Nate Kinsella, “There’s a shimmery, sort of silver quality to his voice when he sings high and nails those long pitches. It’s so beyond what I expected on that song.”

American Football now speaks with rare authority — not because Kinsella has raised his voice, but because he’s earned the weight behind it. LP4 stands as a document of endurance, friendship, creative trust and the strange grace of growing older without growing static.

“From the instrumentation to the arrangements to Nate running into a microphone and apologizing and us leaving it on the album, I’m really proud of the decisions we made,” Mike Kinsella says. “We’ve gotten nothing but better at writing songs.  We worked together way better than we ever had before. This album is a leap of faith, musically, but I’m proud of us for being ambitious enough to try something different.”