American Football is a rock band from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Originally active from 1997 through 2000, the band consists of guitarist/bassist and singer Mike Kinsella, drummer Steve Lamos, and guitar player Steve Holmes. After reuniting in 2014, American Football has continued to make music together. Nate Kinsella also joined the band permanently as bassist during the recording of LP2.
With members who have been part of other notable bands such as Cap’n Jazz and Joan of Arc, American Football brings a wealth of experience to their music. Their unique sound blends elements of rock with introspective lyrics that resonate with listeners. American Football is usually classified as an emo band. The band’s musical style has been also categorized as math rock and post-rock due to the band’s use of uncommon time signatures and guitar tunings in their songs, which is a staple of both genres. The band’s music has also been variously labeled as indie rock, dream pop and slowcore.
“[Mike Kinsella’s] twinkling, technical guitar work […] forms the foundation for the group, [along with] his chemistry with guitarist Steve Holmes, and the ways they weave in and out of each other on [tracks such as] ‘Never Meant’ and ‘I’ll See You When We’re Both Not So Emotional.'”
Since their reunion, American Football has played festival sets and headline shows, captivating audiences with their emotive performances. With each release, they continue to push boundaries and create music that connects deeply with fans around the world.
American Football (Deluxe Edition)
American Football released its self-titled debut EP in 1998 and its self-titled debut album in 1999, both through Polyvinyl Records.
Despite the group’s short initial lifespan, their self-titled debut album became one of the most acclaimed emo and math rock records of its era. It’s Quintessenial emo, a wistful look into heartbreak and the melancholia of being young and in love – five seconds of the guitars on the opening track is enough to transport you back. Apart from a three-song EP, their self-titled 1999 album was all the trio left behind, its nine songs exploring a hushed, thoughtful take on the often more aggressive tones of the hardcore-birthed emo scene. American Football’s songs dig deep into uncommon time signatures and jazz-influenced chords, and even implement understated trumpet and electric piano into their web of interlocking guitar runs and muted, softly smiling vocals. Happening concordantly with a thriving post-rock movement hubbed close by in Chicago, the band has hints of the same musical crosscurrents of Tortoise or Gastr del Sol, setting their songs apart from the flock.
The airy riff in 3/4 time and Kinsella’s buried, eager vocals on opening song “Never Meant” set the tone for an album of soft-spoken yet high-spirited songs not quite like any of the band’s emo contemporaries. The band seemed primarily focused on instrumental composition, with fully instrumental tracks like “You Know I Should Be Leaving Soon” and “The One with the Wurlitzer” standing out and vocals sounding like a floating, distanced element on many of the tunes that include them. The lilting, mysterious tone of the album is only occasionally broken up by an upbeat rocker like “I’ll See You When We’re Both Not So Emotional,” where the band marries its jazz-influenced chops to the same kind of wide-eyed emo pop the Promise Ring was making at the time.
Kinsella would go on to release solo material as Owen, drawing on the same soft-focus melodies he employed with American Football, but the collaborative magic he found with Holmes and Lamos would never quite be recaptured in any of the three’s future projects. Every song here manages to sound meticulously constructed without diminishing the easy, often dreamlike feel of the album. The record is defined by a sense of possibility and youthful discovery, and stands out not just as an anomalistic emo-jazz hybrid but as a lasting, iconic statement in the often blurry history of independent music.
Polyvinyl Records announced a deluxe reissue of the band’s eponymous debut album, including 10 additional unheard demos and live recordings
American Football 2
In 2014, the members of American Football reunited to play a series of shows around the world to all the people who had been touched so deeply by their album originally and over the many years since its release. It went so well that the band (the original trio of Mike Kinsella, Steve Holmes, and Steve Lamos plus Mike’s brother Nate on bass) decided to return to the studio and make an album, which they again titled American Football. The first questions that come to mind before even spinning the record are something like: Have the years changed the band much? Did they embrace electronics or go acoustic or buy a bunch of fuzz pedals? The answers come during the first notes of the opening song, “Where Are We Now?” The band sounds pretty much like it did in the late ’90s.
Two years after reforming, the band released their second album. Again eponymous, and again on Polyvinyl, the album was released in October 2016, preceded by the single “I’ve Been So Lost for So Long”, which was made available for streaming through SoundCloud. The album’s cover featured the same house photographed on the band’s first full-length album, although this time they shot the inside of the house.
The American Football House had become a landmark for emo music fans around the world since the first album’s release, The same crystalline guitar tones, the same interlocking arpeggios, the same kind of shifting time signatures, and the same plaintive vocals are all in place and continue throughout the entire album. It may be a little richer-sounding, less sparse and awkward at times, but mostly it feels like stepping into an audio time machine. The biggest difference is in the lyrics.
Since the guys in the band have aged, started families, and experienced victories and losses over time, the album has a wisdom and weariness that the 1999 album couldn’t have had. It’s an inevitable tradeoff — innocence for experience — but the band doesn’t wallow in it. There’s a matter-of-factness about the new lyrical subject matter that is entirely fitting with the slightly more sophisticated, warmer, and more autumnal sound. Some might miss the more abstract appeal of the original AF album, but the way the band updates and slightly expands that approach makes this new album a resounding success that works on the sonic level, and maybe more importantly, a deep emotional level.
American Football 3
After releasing their reunion album in 2016, the members of American Football started trading song ideas and demos back and forth and realized their sound had evolved. LP2 came across like a continuation of what they had begun so beautifully on LP1 15 years earlier; LP3 takes that sparse, intricate, and emotional sound and expands it in new and interesting ways.
The quartet stretch the songs out, adding long instrumental passages. They add a wider range of instruments to the arrangements — including vibraphone, bells, keyboards, and vocal choirs on one track — all of which give the songs a new richly burnished feel. For the first time, they bring in outside vocalists to sing with Mike Kinsella. Land of Talk’s Elizabeth Powell adds lovely French backing on the languid “Every Wave to Ever Rise,” Rachel Goswell of Slowdive adds softness to one of the album’s few up-tempo songs, “I Can’t Feel You,” and Paramore’s Hayley Williams adds her strong vocals to “Uncomfortably Numb.”
Their contributions mostly work well, adding texture to the arrangements, the band doesn’t do anything that sounds out of sync with their past efforts. But it is still an American Football record and they still know how to splice jagged and jangling guitar lines into affecting shapes, craft melodies that pluck gently at the heart strings, and write words that cut deep — though it’ll be interesting to learn how well the themes of parenthood and growing older resonate with the young fans who’ve recently discovered them.
American Football (LP3) is the third album from the scene giants – American Football. American Football’s original triumph, on their 1999 self-titled debut, was to reunite two shy siblings: emo and post-rock. It was a pioneering album where lyrical clarity was obscured and complicated by the stealth musical textures surrounding it. American Football’s third album, once again eponymous, was released in March 2019, with the single “Silhouettes” made available upon announcement the preceding December. A second single, “Uncomfortably Numb”, followed in January 2019. It featured vocals from Paramore’s Hayley Williams, marking the first time the band had implemented a featured artist on a song.
LP3 is less obviously tethered to the band’s past than the second album. An immediate contrast between LP3 and its two predecessors is its cover. The two previous albums featured the exterior and interior of a residence in the band’s original hometown of Urbana, Illinois (now attracting fans for pilgrimages and photo opportunities), It is a sign of the album’s magnitude in sound, and of the band’s boldness in breaking away from home comforts.
American Football also joked that LP3’s genre was ‘post-house’, because of this very conscious visual break. But, in a strange way, there are links in LP3 with an actual post-house genre: shoegaze. The more exploratory members of the original British shoegaze scene were inspired by the dreamtime and circularity of house music (ambient house in particular), cherishing its sonic possibilities.
LP3 is contemplative, rich, expressive, yet with a queasy undercurrent. It is heavy with expectancy, revealing its ideas slowly, eliciting the hidden stories people carry around with them.
American Football (Live In Los Angeles)
On October 12th and 13th, 2024, American Football performed two sold- out shows at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles – part of the band’s 25th anniversary tour for their self-titled debut album. Featuring guest appearances from Ethel Cain and M.A.G.S., these special shows were recorded for American Football’s first and only live album, “American Football (Live in Los Angeles)”.
Thank you american football for giving me this great recording to remember it by!
American Football (LP4)
Released May 2026, the band announced their fourth eponymous album, again via Polyvinyl. 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.
On their fourth album, LP4, the guys in American Football continue to expand their sound into almost epic proportions, while whittling the lyrical focus down to a sharp point. As on the last album, the band aims for a more filled-in sound, adding instrumentation that goes far beyond guitars, this time some orchestral flourishes and loads of synth pads — and kitting out the arrangements with extra bits of atmospheric richness.
The opening track gives a good clue to the heights the band seem to be aiming for as the song builds and builds to the kind of sonic rush that wouldn’t be out of place on a early-ish Radiohead album. It’s a combination of well-polished and ambitious, so much of a step forward that some fans might be left wondering what happened to the group who cut their first album decades earlier. The lyrical content gives a clue perhaps, as they detail in sometimes brutal terms the inner workings of Mike Kinsella’s marital breakdown and divorce. He spares no feelings, his or his ex-wife’s, and the harsh realities are so tough to swallow that they felt the sounds had to be big enough to contain the roiling, Godzilla-sized emotional turmoil the words convey.
Perhaps the pillows of echo, the church-like ringing of the guitars, the comforting choir of backing vocals, and the waves of echoing keyboards could balance things and keep the record from sounding (too) bitter and broken. That result was always going to be a tall order when songs like “Blood on My Blood” and “Patron Saint of Pale” are sharp enough to cut glass, and the others never let up for a second.
It’s true that the comforting hugeness of the music does go a long way toward cushioning the blow, almost making the album palatable enough for fans who don’t want to revel in Kinsella’s dirty laundry and festering wounds. Anyone in search of the sparse beauty and icy textures of American Football’s early work will no doubt be left reaching back to give their first two records a spin and give this one a pass.
When the idea of recording a fourth album came up (for the second time), American Football knew things were going to get darker. After touring a year’s worth of sold-out 25th Anniversary shows around the world and releasing a covers album (featuring Iron and Wine, Ethel Cain, Blondshell and more), the quartet of Mike & Nate Kinsella, Steve Lamos, and Steve Holmes linked up with producer/engineer Sonny Diperri (My Bloody Valentine, M83, Kurt Vile) to record what would become their most substantial record to date.
Blending atmospheric textures with emotive, post-rock style catharsis, LP4 is unlike anything American Football have recorded thus far, yet it fits right in with their evolving and beautiful catalog.
Recorded during a 10-day retreat at Panoramic House in Stinson Beach, CA, LP4 finds the band intentionally walking into the abyss, themes of divorce, upheaval, and uncertainty are at the forefront. Yet the band sounds more engaged and legitimized than ever before. Opening track “Man Overboard” showcases each member’s strengths: the unmatched style and jazz swing of Lamos’ drumming, the lyrical vulnerability and multi-instrumental mastery of both Kinsellas, and Holmes’ signature guitar work, all swirling together like a shoegaze tornado as the guitars and bass surge into something twisted and warped.
Standouts like “Blood On My Blood” showcase the band’s unique use of alternating time signatures, while “Bad Moons” (the longest track the band has ever recorded) includes some of Kinsella’s most intense lyrics yet. The album also features guest vocals from Turnstile’s Brendan Yates (“No Feeling”), Wisp (“Wake Her Up”), and Rainer Maria’s Caithlin De Marrais (“Blood On My Blood”).
LP4 is an ambitious artistic statement from a band that continues to push the boundaries of genre and culture. It’s a gorgeous and elaborate album, one that takes its time to reveal its beauty while hinting at the darker parts trying their best to stay hidden.
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American Football (Covers) by Various Artists
Alongside and in celebration of American Football (25th Anniversary Edition) arrived American Football (Covers), an ingeniously programmed set that highlights how important their songs and sounds infiltrated and inspired so many corners of music. From string-swept and imaginative folk to idiosyncratic international pop, from intricate instrumental splendour to open-road shoegaze wonder, (Covers) traces—or at least teases—the endless ways the source material has cut across borders of generation, genre, and geography.
Kinsella’s lyrics on American Football were specific in detail but vague in situation. This framework, then, is a perfect invitation for different singers to climb inside and find their own interpretation. There is, for instance, a sweet sense of hope to Iron & Wine’s opening rendition of “Never Meant,” Sam Beam’s singular falsetto pealing like an apology, hoping to pull his lover back toward a relationship’s center. Ethel Cain, meanwhile, lingers and wallows in the uncertainty of the paradoxically titled “For Sure.” Above long, soft drones and guitars that twinkle like stars being extinguished forever, she settles into this song about never really knowing what’s happening. Doom is a foregone conclusion. It is beautiful and tragic, every scene of being together rendered as a pure hypothetical.
In one of the most faithful interpretations here, M.A.G.S. borrows the bitterness and conviction of “I’ll See You When We’re Both Not So Emotional,” less a break-up song than a reckoning with the breaks reality sometimes requires. His keyboard-traced and drum-driven version is sweet but sharp, a reminder that a stop can be an act of self-care. Blondshell slinks into a similar realization during “The Summer Ends,” taking shelter beneath a haze of multi-tracked harmonies and circular guitars to wonder what it’s going to take to move toward happiness—for herself and her partner, either together or apart. “Both been so unhappy,” she sings faintly after a fever breaks. “So let’s just see what happens/when summer ends.” Appropriate for a band who could never have predicted what the future held for these songs, American Football is about not knowing what’s up ahead.
When American Football wrote and recorded these nine songs in 1999, they were also punk kids who were becoming interested in jazz and modern classical. The touchstones that always appear are Miles Davis, Steve Reich, and The Sea and Cake, but the bigger lesson is their interest in engaging other textures and approaches than distortion and drive. That’s clear in the sparkling guitars and shifting rhythms, in the traces of trumpet and whiffs of keys. And it is obvious on (Covers) in the assorted shapes these songs take.
Though never forsaking the tune itself, Manchester Orchestra imbue “Stay Home” with Reich’s pulsing repetition and Electric Miles’ opalescent glow. They find a way to reconnect the song to its burgeoning references. Yvette Young, of Covet, uses webs of guitar, layers of granular synthesis, and lines of mercurial strings to turn the once-skeletal “You Know I Should Be Leaving Soon” into a lush world. And there at the end, John McEntire, busy back in 1999 scheming Tortoise’s Standards and The Sea and Cake’s Oui, routes “The One With the Wurlitzer” into a Motorik anthem. It feels as emotionally unsure as all of American Football, the beat pushing forever forward while the bittersweet keys seem to turn backward, staring off at what might have been.
On the sidewalk outside of the famous house on the cover of American Football, several lines mark where Chris Strong likely stood when he snapped the photo. They are invitations to capture the scene, just as Strong did in 1999. But on the cover of (Covers), nine different images show the home during subsequent phases of the night, the glow from the upstairs window eventually overrunning the frame. (Covers) is a testament to the imagination not only of the original but to those who continue to find it twenty-five years after the band assumed they were done.
released October 18th, 2024
American Football is Mike Kinsella, Nate Kinsella, Steve Holmes & Steve Lamos
The quietest voices don’t just endure — sometimes they deepen.
