American Football open up about 'LP4', artistic longevity, and the stormy circumstances that nearly split the band • Cover Feature • DIY Magazine

The cover of every American Football record gives something away. The artwork for their 1999 debut is perhaps the single most iconic image connected with Midwest emo, a night-time photograph of a suburban home that gazes at the upper floor, as if from the perspective of somebody yearning for the house’s occupant. It’s a perfect visual frame of reference for the album - a snapshot of post-collegiate melancholy - and when the band so improbably reunited fifteen years later, the visuals for their successive albums were similarly revealing. The cover of 2016’s ‘LP2’, a deeper exploration of the first record’s themes, was shot from inside the same house, while the lilac fog of ‘LP3’ suggested that, by 2019, they’d arrived at a sort of middle-aged equilibrium, somewhere between tranquillity and uncertainty.

All of which brings us to next month’s much-anticipated ‘LP4’ - which, unsurprisingly, continues the trend. On first impression, the omens are ill; the bare branches of winter trees stretch across a foreboding, blood-red sky. Flip the record over, and the track listing is similarly portentous: songs titles include ‘Bad Moons’, ‘No Feeling’ and ‘No Soul to Save’.

Perhaps most evocative, though, is its opener, ‘Man Overboard’; appropriate, given that the tempestuous circumstances surrounding the group’s new album almost engulfed two of their four members. “Some of his darkest lyrics are on this record,” says guitarist Steve Holmes of frontman Mike Kinsella, “and they’re some of his best, too.”

In 2014, fifteen years after graduating college and going their separate ways, American Football reformed for what they assumed would be a small handful of live shows, buoyed by their one and only album having gradually found a new, younger audience. ‘LP2’ was the sound of a band trying to remember how to be one, and perhaps second-guessing what they thought this fledgling new fan base might want from them.

‘LP3’ was much more confident, meanwhile, striking off in new sonic directions and ushering in high-profile guests like Hayley Williams and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, as if the quartet had realised that the band could be more than just a portal to the past. “We were getting closer to who we are now, and what we really wanted to say at this point in our lives,” Mike says. “We weren’t just trying to write according to some preconceived idea of what American Football should sound like.”

‘LP4’ is even more ambitious, and represents a blood-letting; both an outlet for emotions stockpiled, and a blank canvas to which the group have liberally applied new ideas. Various storms gathered over the course of the nearly seven years since their last album, with drummer Steve Lamos walking away from the band, only to dramatically reverse his decision; Mike, meanwhile, was almost dragged under the waves by the emotional tumult of divorce, and a subsequent worsening of his reliance on alcohol.

It is the purest distillation yet of the alchemy that occurs when Kinsella, Holmes, Lamos and bassist Nate Kinsella (Mike’s cousin) work together. “There are some moments on this record where I feel like, if I were to drop dead tomorrow, I’d want them to play [them] at my funeral, because this is what I’ve been trying to say all along,” asserts Lamos.

“ There are some moments on this record where I feel like, if I were to drop dead tomorrow, I’d want them to play [them] at my funeral, because this is what I’ve been trying to say all along. — Steve Lamos

He was the first man overboard during the turbulent making of ‘LP4’, announcing his departure in late 2021. “It wasn’t the most pleasant decision I’ve ever made,” he reflects today, speaking over Zoom from his Chicago home. The band’s peculiar new dynamic had finally been stretched to breaking point; since they reformed, they’d been comprised of two lifelong career musicians - Mike and Nate - and two hobbyists in Holmes and Lamos, who’d spent the intervening years working desk jobs.

The latter was struggling to balance his role as a university professor with the group’s touring commitments, but also found himself clashing with Mike creatively, feeling that the frontman would often weaponise his greater experience to win studio arguments. “I was frustrated, and trying to swap ideas over Zoom didn’t help; it felt like it wasn’t working,” he admits. “Nothing was quite scratching the itch, and it led to arguments; it felt like things were breaking down a little bit.”

‘Man Overboard’ began life as a Lamos demo, and opens with a beat that is unmistakably his; he channels his deep love of jazz into unpredictable, off-kilter patterns that provide a suitably uneasy backdrop for a song on which Mike sings: “My anchor’s cut loose / What’s life like without you?” It is one of a slew of songs on ‘LP4’ that refer to the collapse of the singer’s marriage, but that line could just as easily be about the loss of Lamos - an absence the rest of the band were never likely to take lying down. “We were just waiting him out, really, hoping he’d see sense,” says Holmes on a separate video call, smiling ruefully. “It was pretty clear we couldn’t do it without him.”

“It’s like anything else,” Mike adds, on the same line as Holmes. “When you don’t have it, you miss it more. I could write a million demos, but they will all have my own drum aesthetic to them. Until I pass them to Lamos, they don’t sound like American Football.” Lamos spent much of 2022 chasing the band for his exit papers; they made excuses, and held him off. “I think they were being gracious, giving me the time and space I needed,” he muses. “We were all going through things; adult, real-life stuff, inside and outside of the band. In the end, I missed it. I missed them.”

“ I just don’t think it’s fair to diminish anything, just because it’s embarrassing or a little too vulnerable. On this album, I went just as deep as I ever have solo. — Mike Kinsella

By 2023, he was back in the fold, and the band were on the road again - mended as a unit, if not necessarily as people. Both before and since they reunited in 2014, Mike has been prolific in his solo output under the pseudonym Owen, where he writes material that’s sonically softer and more acoustic-led than with American Football, but no less confessional. Even a cursory listen to his 2020 album ‘The Avalanche’ makes it clear that his marriage of over a decade was over; last year’s follow-up, ‘The Falls of Sioux’, began to reckon with his next chapter. The un-mooring effect of his divorce - the manner in which it pulled his emotional foundation out from under him - is a recurrent theme on ‘LP4’.

“It’s way easier to write if you feel like nobody’s actually going to hear it,” he says of his work with Owen, recognising that American Football’s reach dwarfs that of his solo project. “So that was something I was aware of. There were going to be so many more eyes on this.” It’s a source of potential discomfort for both artist and listener; when the band played Leeds’ Brudenell Social Club in July 2023, a candid admission Mike made about his mental health from the stage was met with an uncomfortable silence, as if the audience were struggling with the reality of the human beings behind the emo band they love.

“I just don’t think it’s fair to diminish anything, just because it’s embarrassing or a little too vulnerable,” says Mike of his lyrical direction on ‘LP4’. “If that’s what the song calls for, that’s what it should get. On ‘LP2’, I remember being pretty vague and thinking: ‘I’ll save the specifics for Owen - I’ll dive in further there’. But on this album, I went just as deep as I ever have solo.”

It makes for a confronting listen at times; the record’s epic lead single, ‘Bad Moons’, runs past the eight-minute mark and has Mike on unflinching form, mining the depths of his depression as well as his insecurities, self-describing as “just two little boys in a trench coat with plastic knives” who is “scared and [doesn’t] want to grow up”. His bandmates encouraged the catharsis; the words resonated especially closely with Holmes, who has also been through a divorce since ‘LP3’ - which happened, in part, because of the strain of his commitments to the band.

“These are some of the best lyrics of [Mike’s] career, even if that’s awkward to say with him on the call,” says Holmes. “And it’s embarrassing to say this about your own band, but there were some songs on this record where I was tearing up listening to the mixes, because a lot of the lyrics hit really personally for me. Mike’s made god knows how many albums, and I think he’s under-recognised as one of the best songwriters of our generation. I can’t help thinking of the work he’s doing now as being like his version of what Tom Waits was doing in 1999 with ‘Mule Variations’. Or maybe it’s our ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’. They’re lofty comparisons, but fair ones, I think.”

“For a lot of reasons, this is an album that we only ever could have made now, as opposed to 25 years ago,” adds Nate; as if to illustrate his point, his daughter, home sick from school, chooses this moment to wander into the frame of the video call. “I’ve known Mike my whole life, and his lyrics have always been a mystery to me - we’ll be working on music, and the lyrics just appear one day. It’s like a fun gift when they pop up.

“And I don’t think he knows where they’re coming from; I don’t think he sat down to write ‘Bad Moons’ knowing he’d come up with that amazing line about plastic knives, because he lost his sharp ones in the divorce. But, musically, we always work towards a feel, a certain perspective in the sound, and Mike goes from there. We don’t push back and we don’t need to, because he’s capable of such a wide scope of emotions by himself.”

“ There were some songs on this record where I was tearing up listening to the mixes, because a lot of the lyrics hit really personally for me. — Steve Holmes

And his bandmates mirror that on ‘LP4’ - a work that is their most sonically adventurous to date. It’s playful, expanding both their instrumental palette and cast of collaborators; Brendan Yates of Turnstile, Caithlin De Marrais of Rainer Maria and Natalie R. Lu of Wisp all make appearances. Influences run the gamut from shoegaze to Steve Reich, and musical whims were embraced rather than eschewed; on ‘Patron Saint of Pale’, Mike literally says “fuck it!” and invites the listener to play rock, paper, scissors.

“We approached this one with a mindset of ‘if something’s pulling you, then follow it’, and I love the directions that’s taken us in,” smiles Lamos. Holmes agrees: “we wanted to be ambitious, and push the boundaries of what the coolest thing we can do is with our limited time, talent and resources.”

Now, they’ve moved past the hang-ups they had a decade ago, where they were perhaps too mindful of their new-found audience. But that’s not to say they aren’t aware of the band’s cultural footprint, which seems to be growing with every passing year; increasingly, they’re finding new fans via viral moments on TikTok and Fortnite, and last year launched their own collaborative line of Vans with a party at the very house immortalised by ‘LP1’’s cover, which drew luminaries from across the worlds of music, skateboarding and photography.

Ultimately, Lamos maintains that the songs on ‘LP4’ contain plenty of flickers of optimism for those who look for them, and, as much as the return of American Football has tested careers and relationships, their overall outlook is one of quiet wonder that the band aren’t just surviving, but thriving all these years later.

“Somehow, what we did nearly 30 years ago is meaningful to 18 year olds from seven thousand miles away,” he says. “We’re firmly in the middle of our lives now - sick kids wandering across the Zoom screen and all - and my main feeling is ‘holy cow - old guys get to make music!’ We get to travel the world this summer. I know a lot of people my age who feel very stuck where they are in life, so I think we all feel very lucky that, for all the depressing moments, there are just as many that are inspiring and amazing. This is a dark record, but I hope some of that shines through.”

‘LP4’ is out on 1st May via Polyvinyl.

Tags: Cover Features, Features, American Football, April 2026