American Football’s True Confessions

Culture

American Football’s True Confessions

When an album they'd made in college became an unlikely inspiration to generations of young rock bands, American Football got back together and hit the road—but can the reluctant Midwest-emo heroes survive midlife?

By Grayson Haver Currin

March 2, 2026

Alexa Viscius

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All this week, Mike Kinsella has been losing sleep over a guitar solo.

On a Thursday afternoon in mid-January, Mike is seven chicken wings and two tall gin-and-sodas into lunch at Lottie’s, a favorite sports pub in Chicago, where trash collectors in neon vests belly up to the bar beside servers from far more ostentatious restaurants. Early this week, a singer-songwriter more famous than Mike will likely ever be sent him a song that was essentially finished. There was already a guitar solo on the track, right after she screamed her way out of the second verse, but she told Mike she wanted him to replace it with something more—her words—“Midwest emo.” Could he do it?

Mike listened and admitted that the existing solo, however roughshod and muddy it was, already seemed pretty Midwest emo, a term that’s been his albatross for nearly three decades and makes him grimace like the name of an ex he’d rather forget. (“I could write the best emo album ever,” he says with a grin.) He dispatched another idea: a galloping nylon-string-guitar run that he then overrode with a gargantuan electric surge. She was polite but insistent—that was cool, man, but could he maybe just play something serpentine and pretty on his Telecaster, like he did when he was in his 20s?

He had 50 other ideas. He sent five. And yet, still, she wanted the basic Mike Kinsella sound, that Midwest emo thing he helped invent.

“It’s like she wants me to do a voiceover for a story that’s already written,” Mike tells me, reaching for one more wing before stuffing the rest in a to-go box. “I’m not insulted—but do you want the thing AI would write if you said, ‘Write Midwest emo guitar’? Or are you paying me for how I’m hearing your song?”

In six weeks, Mike will turn 49. Since he joined his older brother Tim’s band, Cap’n Jazz, in 1991, when he was around 14, he has made dozens of records in a string of bands which a cast of very old friends and family members have shuffled in and out of, including Joan of Arc and Lies. In the last 25 years, he has released most of his music as Owen, an often pretty solo project that has served for a quarter-century as a diary of travails and travels, self-doubts and little joys.

But the record that undoubtedly prompted the songwriter to ask for that solo, the one that long ago made Mike the reluctant prince of Midwest emo, was the one he made just before Owen began: American Football’s self-titled 1999 debut, known to its legions of fans as “LP1.” Mike cut it with two friends named Steve—Lamos, the drummer, and Holmes, the guitarist—in a nondescript studio on a quiet residential street in Urbana, just as the three were about to finish school at the University of Illinois. They planned to release it on Polyvinyl, the local label their friends ran, and then break up. Those nine songs would be a snapshot of the college kids they had been, not a suggestion of the people they were going to become.

“We saw ourselves as documentarians of a scene. They were friends, and we wanted to help them out, even if it’s the only record they ever made,” Polyvinyl cofounder Matt Lunsford tells me in a ramen spot next to the now-30-year-old label’s offices in Champaign. Darcie Lunsford, the label’s cofounder, grins at the idea. “We didn’t know where it was going to take us, that it would lead to this.”

The “this” is the extraordinary and uncanny story of American Football, who became one of this century’s most influential rock bands in part because they no longer existed. In the weeks after Polyvinyl released the band’s album in September 1999, 21 college radio stations added its tracks to rotation—very respectable, Lunsford remembers, given that the expectations were essentially nil. But as the album seeped onto file-sharing services like Napster and Limewire, the kids who first downloaded it often bought a copy themselves. I worked in a college-town record store right as LP1 entered that growth curve, and I must have slipped hundreds of CD copies into Schoolkids Records paper bags before I finally listened and bought one myself.

There was this enchanting mysteriousness to it all: Why had these guys broken up? Where had the Steves gone? And what was up with that white house on the cover, bathed in the gray-green light of suburban dusk? Polyvinyl kept LP1 in print. By December 2002, according to CMJ, it had become their “best-selling catalog release”; it remains one of Polyvinyl’s top-five sellers ever, an incredible feat for a band on one of indie rock’s most consistent labels. Lunsford laughs when he admits that American Football helped pay for Polyvinyl’s office next door, behind a Safelite windshield-repair shop.

That may be the least of American Football’s impact. Their album became a cornerstone of modern emo but also stood apart from it, its intricate guitar patterns and sophisticated rhythms putting it in a warped conversation with Steve Reich and Chicago post-rock. Mike’s sensitive writing and crooning remain a touchstone for successive generations of confessional songwriters. Phoebe Bridgers opened for them. The 1975’s Matty Healy, who indeed discovered LP1 via Limewire, called them one of his favorite bands ever, noting that their debut remains “a really, really beautiful moment.” 2024's American Football (Covers) featured LP1 songs performed by Ethel Cain, Iron & Wine, and John McEntire, the drummer who was so influential to their sound.

American Football has been sampled by PinkPantheress, memed a whole lot, and embraced by the Fortnite community. “Never Meant,” the heartsick and sweet miniature epic that opens the record, has been called the best emo song of 1999 (besting Saves the Day and Jimmy Eat World) and also of all time (besting everyone). It has been covered on the lute, the bassoon, the harpejji, and essentially every other instrument you can imagine.

And the album led, in 2014, to an ongoing reunion that saw the band—whose early shows sometimes attracted so few people they never bothered to step onstage—playing marquee slots at Primavera, touring five continents, and selling out massive theaters. They have since made three more records, including LP4, their most audacious and potentially polarizing album, out May 1. From their sound to their success, everything about American Football has always seemed modest; LP4 has a grandeur only suggested by their previous records. It’s the work of middle-aged men considering the possibility that they can be something other than what they have been.

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Alexa Viscius

“It was a weird thing to have done nothing and then just arriving at the middle of music somehow. None of this was meant to happen, and, arguably, none of it should have happened,” Holmes, also 48, tells me over dinner in a crowded Chicago restaurant. “Everybody [we knew] was in a band, and half of them put out records. At least a third of those are as good as our record, and no one gives a shit. We hit the lottery somehow.”

Winning the lottery, of course, rarely comes without unexpected costs. Imagine if the casual art project you had at 22 unexpectedly became your life 15 years later and remained that way, even as you edged or passed 50. It would be complicated, right? And what if, as that art project got more popular than ever, your life started to fall apart, a little or a lot? Would you take that Faustian bargain?

During the last decade, two members of American Football have gotten divorced, due in part to the band’s return. They have all struggled with anxiety but delighted in the sense that this is all an unexpected party; both feelings have been a reason to drink. Mike tells me repeatedly he is a “high-functioning alcoholic” and a “drunk fucking idiot,” and almost everyone around him tells me repeatedly they worry about him. Everyone has aging parents, multiple kids, and their own nascent health concerns.

What’s more, in order to put on a show, American Football has ballooned from three members to six, sometimes even seven, and the dynamics those additions introduced prompted the band to break up again in 2020. LP4 is the first album of their second reunion but the first they’ve made while trying to be actual adults about it all, working to untether themselves from bad old habits. They are trying to rehearse more, rage less. Dark, brooding, and romantic, LP4 is about who they have become, not who they were.

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A few weeks after that lunch, with Mike now just days away from 49, I ask him what finally happened with that guitar solo. He sighs and talks me through all the other iterations he sent—acoustic guitar with piano, another nylon-stringed try, an electric guitar washed in harmonies. He doesn’t know what the songwriter will end up using, if anything, but he shrugs and says he doesn’t really care anymore. He starts rattling off younger players who would have done a better job, like American Football fan and collaborator Yvette Young.

“I was tapped. I didn’t have any other ideas. Maybe she wanted it to be real busy, but I was just hearing it different,” he says near the end of eight very candid hours of talking. “I was hearing it with a 50-year-old brain: Let me give you this poignant little moment.”

When the party bus arrives, the cameras are already rolling.

In the front yard of 704 West High Street, just a few blocks from the edge of the University of Illinois, a half-dozen people hoist cell phones and smile. Others crouch with more professional rigs, waiting for the perfect shot. One man with a video rig strapped to a gimbal strides across a little rectangle of grass. He’s frowning, like he’s beyond tired of waiting. Maybe he thinks it’s going to be a long, weird night. He’s right.

This is the “American Football House (Warming) Party,” a backyard Urbana shindig for townies, their kids, and the occasional actual celebrity. Hayley Williams was there, laughing like a local, though rumors of an impending Tim Robinson drop-in turned out to be false. Almost every conversation turned into a local history lesson, about how Champaign-Urbana had once seemed the next Seattle or how great the Kinsella kids had been at Chicago’s Fireside Bowl long ago.

Just after noon on the last Saturday in October, I met most of American Football in Chicago, at a fancy and bustling hotel near Fulton Market. A white bus waited outside, already laden with coolers of beer and stacks of snacks. A few dozen professional skateboarders, photographers, and family members climbed inside. We rode south toward Urbana on Interstate 57—Emo Highway, a friend once called it—for two hours.

A High Life forever in his hand, Mike walked up and down the aisles, greeting everyone like a politician who knew the race was in the bag. Lamos, sober for more than a year now, sat in his seat with a box of LaCroix and some crackers, telling me about how strange this all seemed. “You know, I own part of this house,” he said. “But I’ve never been inside.”

If you search 704 West High Street in Urbana on Google Maps, it is listed as a “Place of Worship” with 5 stars. If you search 704 West High Street on Airbnb, it is listed as a three-bedroom rental available for around $200 per night, also with 5 stars. It is, of course, the American Football House, depicted on the cover of their first two albums. And, today, it’s the site of a nostalgic house party for a band that never even lived here but that they now, as Lamos said, own.

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Chris Strong had, however, lived there. When he was a junior at the University of Chicago, Strong shared the basement apartment at 704 with a fellow photographer. He was a lifelong illustrator who had fallen in love with the immediacy of photographs as a student. He became accustomed to moving through the world with a camera, always looking for a shot. One night in March 1998, the time of year “when it’s still all muddy and cold” in Urbana, he found one, by looking up at the front of his own white house. Strong moved out months later. The snap became the cover of American Football’s debut and, steadily, a bit of rock iconography.

Yet he didn’t respond to the first Instagram message about buying 704 West High Street in August 2022. He was a father of three, after all, and he was in Scotland collecting the remains of his wife, Katie, after she was killed with her brother and mother in a traffic accident. But he mentioned it to Matt Kellen, Mike Kinsella’s best friend, who already owned and operated a series of Airbnbs in Chicago and Michigan. A month later, Lies—Mike’s band with his younger cousin, Nate—played Pygmalion, the local festival that had prompted American Football to reunite eight years earlier. The idea came up afterward in the bar. After a few drinks, it started to sound like a good one.

“We had a whole bunch of discussions about, are we really serious? And how will it work?’” Lunsford tells me. “But the guys in the band were very much like, ‘This random-ass house has given so much to us. How can we give back with it?’”

When they saw the inside, they were stunned by its disrepair and how it looked like exactly what it was—a college rental, for decades. Eight months later, in May 2023, Strong, Kellen, Polyvinyl, American Football, and the skate photographer Atiba Jefferson closed on the house for $200,000. They got to work repairing it and, a little more than a year later, offered it on Airbnb. Some people book it, of course, because they want to sleep in the American Football House, but sometimes people book it because it’s a five-star three-bedroom Airbnb near the campus and its football stadium. At least one renter eventually asked Kellen why vans full of random boys kept standing in the streets to take photos of the place. “I’ve got to tell you,” she said. “There’s nothing special about this house.”

The block party was also Jefferson’s idea. In March 2024, he took a job as the “brand curator” at Vans, where his twin brother, Ako, had worked as creative director since 2017. Skateboarding was part of American Football’s pedigree. Polyvinyl’s cofounders, Matt and Darcie Lunsford, met because he had to sit out high-school gym class after cracking his elbow skating. What if, Jefferson wondered, Vans threw the first American Football show at the American Football House?

For more than a year, they wrestled with local noise ordinances and rules that stipulated that, if they did a gig, it had to be a free block party. They finally agreed to do a backyard event, featuring professional skaters flown in to do tricks on a halfpipe in front of and behind the house. Attendees would get free American Football totes branded by PBR; some would get Vans sneakers printed with the cover of LP1, band logo and all.

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Soon after the bus finally arrived, Lamos headed upstairs, peering out of the bedroom windows of a house he co-owns for the first time like a kid finally seeing snow. Old friends passed around shots of Midwest Drāno, also known as Malört. An artist named Rich Salamander gifted Mike a salvaged skate deck that he’d turned into a model of the house with paint and wire. The Jeffersons quickly cordoned off the street, so that skaters could fly off ramps as the band stood in front of 704 for a portrait. “If you take a photo,” Atiba told the few dozen people in the street, all holding their phones high, “please don’t post it before we do.” It felt like a homecoming for local celebrities, old friends chuffed to see that this accidentally successful band had come back for a visit.

What seemed a polite if awkward neighborhood barbecue started to turn strange after dark. The front of the house glowed neon green, lit to replicate the eerie glow of LP1’s cover. One local skater decided to climb the roof in the backyard and aim over the wobbly gutter toward the half-pipe, an idea a friend eventually convinced him was suicidal. Everyone sang happy birthday to Lamos as he labored over his candles. Servers cut a black sheet cake perfectly printed with a drawing of the house and the Vans and PBR logos into 54 pieces and passed them around on paper plates. I nabbed the rectangle with the house numbers and thought about how some people would consider this holy communion.

Inside, the Jeffersons started to DJ, and every member of American Football except Holmes took turns playing along on an acrylic drumkit borrowed from a Polyvinyl employee and pushed into a corner of the crowded living room. Williams sat a few feet from the kick drum, often beaming and sometimes singing along. Mike did “Never Meant.” Wearing a Cap’n Jazz shirt, Nate bashed out a few pop numbers. Lamos played a bit, but then he went for a walk to escape the excitement, to think about the time when they were all just kids here. The house was loud, and Urbana seemed sleepy.

“It felt kind of boring, especially since there wasn’t much else to do among the cows and the cornfields and frat parties except to make music,” he soon wrote about the night’s epiphanies in a yet-unpublished essay. “Boring houses and apartments gave us the room to pursue our musical ideas for their own sake, with no practical agenda whatsoever.”

I didn’t hear anyone mention the long-finished LP4—as of that night, it was an unspoken if open secret. For a few more hours, American Football—all of us, really—set aside their future for their past.

When Tim Kinsella was four, he began to have the irrepressible urge to scream.

His mom, Donna, suggested a novel solution: Whenever he felt that way, all he had to do was tell her. She’d take him to the bathroom with the pink toilet and shower and flower-festooned walls and shut the door, and he was free to scream until he passed out. He did this for eight years until, one day, his father, Tom, walked in on him. “He freaked out. ‘What is wrong with you? What are you even doing?’” Tim tells me. “I still remember the quotes, but they’re too offensive to put on the record.”

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That was, by most accounts, the dynamic in the Kinsella household in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, then a suburb of about 20,000 just north of Chicago. An Italian-American who grew up on the outskirts of Chicago, Donna was and still is doting, delighting in stories about how Tim’s first-grade teacher said he would be president or how quickly Mike made friends. An Irish-American who grew up on a farm in Illinois, Tom was a mechanically minded kid who became a civil engineer. He sold packaging machines to big companies, and he loved to go out drinking with friends.

“He used to drink until he passed out every day. I would want to, like, shoot hoops in junior high, but he was drunk,” Mike remembers, frowning. “He was from an Irish family with an addiction. But in hindsight, he wasn’t in a happy marriage, and he wasn’t communicating what he needed to be happy. My mom was amazing and would have tried to help.”

Soon after Tom found Tim screaming in the bathroom, the eldest son found a new way to cope: screaming in a rock band. Donna knew how to play ten Christmas tunes on the family piano, but her kids had given up quickly on formal lessons of their own. “I never had any interest in writing a song or making a melody or harmony. I wanted to play as fast as possible and scream,” Tim says. “Starting a punk band let me satiate that need—and not just be able to do it but to get positive feedback for it, not to get in trouble.”

The summer before high school began, Tim had started a band called Toe Jam. He was skating one afternoon in a charcoal shirt emblazoned with that band’s logo—the “o” and the “a” overlapping to form the anarchy symbol—when he struck up a conversation with a skater he’d never seen. The guy, Victor Villareal, asked about the shirt. He liked the name, because it reminded him of a joke his grandfather used to make. Tim invited him over and handed him his Washburn guitar. Villareal loved Duran Duran and heavy metal and had been playing drums, saxophone, guitar, and organ for years. He took lessons. Tim was so impressed by what Villareal played that he called his little brother, Mike, into the living room to listen. Victor handed the guitar back to Tim and told him to play.

“I’m thinking this guy fucking shreds, just solos and shit, you know? But he’s just freaking out with his right hand, all over the fretboard,” says Villareal, laughing. “I don’t think he hit a scale the whole time.”

Tim told Villareal he was too good to join Toe Jam, but Villareal pleaded his way into the band, anyway. While Toe Jam practiced in the basement, Mike would listen through the floorboards and play along on guitar. One day, Tim’s ride home from a skate park arrived late, so he missed the start of Toe Jam practice. Mike was in the basement, playing with his brother’s band. “They all said it was great having a second guitarist, that he needed to be in the band. I said, ‘This guy? No way,’” Tim remembers. “They said, ‘He’s in the band, or you’re out.’ OK, fine.”

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But Toe Jam didn’t last. Their drummer’s dad wanted him to focus on football, so Mike volunteered to learn. Donna found a deal on a 14-piece drum set, including six rototoms, not realizing how overwhelming such a beast can be for a novice player. They got rid of the basement pool table to make space for it. Donna became an enthusiastic host, welcoming anyone who wanted to watch band practice, always ready with a big bowl of garlic potatoes or pasta salad when it was over. Their dad was less vocal in his support, but Donna says he was quietly proud, occasionally helping get them a show at a local Moose Lodge.

Mike first went on tour as a high-school freshman, playing a basement outside of Milwaukee. “I don’t know why my mom let me go, but Tim made it normal for me to go on these weekend trips,” he says. “We were sleeping on floors, and everyone is taking you to the coolest spots in the city—cliff-diving or whatever the fun shit is.”

The tension between the brothers proved crucial. “Even in grade school, Tim Kinsella was a big personality—a little strange, undeniably charismatic. Tim was intense and had a vision,” remembers Kellen, Mike’s best friend then and now. “Mike had to figure out a way that worked for him, because he couldn’t be Tim. They pushed each other.”

Cap’n Jazz was a remarkable band—angular, accessible, and explosive all at once. Before joining Toe Jam, Villareal had taken classical guitar lessons and was intrigued when his teacher tuned an E string to a D. Years later, trying to shape a Cap’n Jazz riff, he pulled out his classical guitar, tuned two strings down, and wrote the core of “Olerud,” the band’s first song in an alternate tuning. “That felt like a breakthrough for me and for the band,” Villareal says. “We were structuring something that felt like the next level.”

But they couldn’t last, either. Put simply, Villareal loved getting fucked up and finding new ways to justify it to himself. At first, it was because his parents split when he was six and his childhood had been rough. And then it was because he was in a traveling rock band and all his heroes had partied. After a show in Columbia, Missouri in July 1995, Villareal assumed he would be in bed soon, so he slammed several beers and a lot of pills. As they started driving toward Little Rock, he blacked out. As he drove, Mike looked over to see Villareal pissing on everything, his eyes crossed.

“I was going in and out of consciousness, but I do remember hearing the words, ‘He looks like the devil.’ I remember the emotional intensity of it, and that was Mike,” Villareal says, frowning. “I bet it fucking affected him, man. He was just the kid—so were we, but he was younger, not in the same place.”

They rushed him to the hospital. Though Cap’n Jazz had split a few times, that was the real end of the band. Mike wasn’t really sure the road lifestyle was for him. He’d endured his dad’s addiction and now his bandmate’s. He didn’t really party like that, didn’t want to. “Getting in the van with Tim and everybody smoking and two addicts at the same time, it scared me,” he says as The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face” plays in Lottie’s—a little on the nose, if you ask me. “It didn’t look fun. It still creeps me out.”

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Just weeks after Cap’n Jazz imploded, Mike enrolled at the University of Illinois, living in a decrepit dorm called Taft-Van Doren. His roommate was Steve Holmes, a punk wild child from nearby Wheeling. Their bands had shared bills back home, and they had dated best friends. A week or two into college, Mike called his parents at home, and Donna said she was divorcing his father. “My world wasn’t flipped upside down,” he says. “It was like, ‘Good for both of you.’”

That October, Donna drove nearly three hours south along Interstate 57 to pick the boys up at school, turn around, and take them to Chicago’s Rainbo Room. Fugazi, Shellac, and The Make-Up were sharing a triple bill. She’d not only volunteered to take them—she’d also baked Fugazi a banana cake. “What was the word they used—straight-edge? I really liked that,” Donna says. “I really respected Fugazi and was glad my boys were following such a good band.”

Mike remembers Donna walking up to the front door, explaining to security that she had baked Fugazi a cake, and delivering it. (John Darnielle, of the Mountain Goats, was working backstage security that night.) “It didn’t even seem that weird for my mom to make Fugazi a cake,” Mike says, laughing. “But we never got the sheet pan back.”

Tim avoided the cake exchange. “Mortified from a distance,” he tells me. But, later, when he was stuffing records in the shipping department at Southern Records, Ian MacKaye walked through the door. Tim told him that he’d met his mother at the Rainbo. MacKaye remembered. “She was psyched,” he said. “She was crazed.”

Cap’n Jazz changed Steve Lamos’ life.

He too had grown up in the Chicago suburbs, not so far from the Kinsellas, but his musical environment was entirely different. His father, a first-generation American citizen born to German and Slovak parents, was a high-school teacher who moonlighted as an accordion player in area VFWs. He only allowed classic jazz in the house and delighted as he pulled the tape from his eldest son’s cassette of Van Halen’s 1984. (Emerson, Lake & Palmer were the exception, because of a rumor that Stan Kenton approved of them.)

Lamos began learning violin around the age of four. When he was six, one of his dad’s VFW musician buddies stopped by with a horn and showed him a few trumpet tricks. Lamos instantly got it. “The grown-ups noticed that I was relatively in tune,” Lamos, 52, says, “and they’d say, ‘Oh, you’ve got a pretty sound.’”

His dad would tote him to his gigs, inviting him on the bandstand for a song or two. Lamos progressed steadily, nabbing first chairs and taking star turns until he plateaued late in high school. The younger players were simply better; he couldn’t figure out how to improve. He was an A student who excelled at most everything, so frustration was new territory. Still, he stuck with trumpet as an engineering student at DePaul University, joining a jazz band until his professor scoffed at him. “The guy who was running the class said something like, ‘Do you really think you should be doing that right now?’” Lamos remembers. “I walked out, put the trumpet away for two years, and transferred to Illinois.”

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His younger brother, John, wouldn’t stop talking about this band he kept seeing back home, Cap’n Jazz. Lamos typically deplored his brother’s taste, and had once tossed John’s Screeching Weasel cassette from a speeding car. But Lamos was finding a new scene. He had started playing a little trumpet with Braid, the Champaign emo heroes, so he decided to heed his brother’s tip. He drove the half-hour east to the little town of Danville to see Cap’n Jazz in a Knights of Columbus hall. Matt Lunsford and Darcie Knight—then in the earliest days of making a zine they called Polyvinyl Press and not yet married—put the show together.

“It felt like being hit by lightning,” Lamos tells me on a Saturday morning in a little café in a former Colorado mining town near where we both live. “They’re really straight-forward rock techniques, but the way Tim would scream from the root to the fifth? And Mike, especially at that time, was like watching an electric motor. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen.”

He was a tad starstruck, then, when Mike tapped him on the shoulder and said he wanted to sing in his band. Around the time of Lamos’ Cap’n Jazz epiphany, he’d started playing drums, joining a punk band that had lost its timekeeper. There had been a kit in his childhood home, so he knew how to keep a basic beat. Soon after Mike and Holmes arrived as freshman in Urbana, Holmes actually tried out for one of Lamos’ bands. He decided not to join, though, because he thought the drummer sucked.

“He really was not that good,” Holmes remembers, laughing. “But six months later, we went to see his new band, and he was doing these John McEntire beats. Where did that come from?”

The answer was practice. Lamos had formally studied music for 16 years, even taking private Saturday lessons while struggling at DePaul. He’d learned discipline from his parents, but he didn’t want to take formal lessons ever again. So he’d sit still for four hours every day, running through drum books by Buddy Rich and another about “limb independence” he’d borrowed from his dad. He obsessively played along to James Brown and Sly Stone records.

So Mike wanted to sing with Lamos' impressive new instumental trio— Cast Called Up, with brothers David and Allen Johnson. Mike was playing some drums and guitar in his brother’s own new band, Joan of Arc, so singing seemed like an interesting challenge. Lamos wasn’t sure they even needed a singer, but how could he resist the kid from Cap’n Jazz? “It felt like a TV star was talking to me—this cute young guy, a super good drummer,” Lamos says, laughing. “If there is a charisma scale from 0 to 100, he is at 183. People are just drawn to him.”

When Mike joined, Cast Called Up changed its name to The One Up Downstairs. They recorded three songs in 1997 but broke up before they had a chance to release them. Lamos doesn’t like to talk about how that band ended, even insisting he doesn’t remember it. “It was a pretty unpleasant thing for everyone involved, a very tense environment,” he tells me, sighing. “The less I think about it, the better.”

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But it’s not only a pivotal moment in American Football’s genesis but a prescient one for the band’s ups and downs during the last three decades. “I remember everything,” Mike says with a Cheshire grin. He’d gone home for the weekend to see his mom. The phone rang, and it was Lamos. “He said, ‘The band broke up. Allen attacked me. He jumped over the drums and punched me in the face.’”

Lamos soon left the house he shared with the brothers. Because it was several weeks into the semester, he found a deal on an empty little coach house in Urbana. His practice intensified. Lamos had always liked Holmes. “He was a holy fucking terror in high school,” Lamos says. “He and my brother would, like, throw rocks and run around the ’burbs. He was just a suburban goof, a guy who I thought I would want to hang out with.”

So when Holmes told Lamos he had a few songs he was working on, the drummer told him to come to his place at 109 ½ West Washington. He didn’t have roommates, and they could play all they wanted. “He came over a bunch, and we started dicking around with these things,” remembers Lamos. “I’m pretty sure he had the ‘Never Meant’ riff.”

Katie Buchanan had an instant crush on Mike.

She had certainly seen him several times before they really talked in Urbana in August 1997. When she was a 12-year-old in Peoria, she fell in love with Ride through a Sassy magazine sampler and soon started going to shows. She’d see punk bands in the local Elks Lodge or go to the Metro in Chicago to see Jawbreaker. She was an early Joan of Arc acolyte, too. “It was just our social life,” she tells me. “We would drive to the Fireside Bowl in Chicago on school nights.”

At a show in Peoria, Buchanan met Kellen, who had gone to school with Mike since first grade. He was a college freshman, and she was still in high school. They became fast friends, anyway. Kellen soon transferred to Urbana, eventually becoming roommates with Mike and Holmes. When Buchanan transferred to a nearby school, she came to visit her old friend.

“Mike was this genuinely kind person who had no ego. He was really humble and funny, and we were totally in sync as friends,” Buchanan says. When I suggest that Mike’s energy reminds me of a golden retriever’s, she laughs and says she actually has one, Juney. “There was just something magnetic.”

For a while, though, they simply remained friends. When Mike left the suburbs for college, he was still dating his high-school girlfriend, Allison Zakrzewski, who had a year left. They only lived two hours apart, but it felt like they existed in different worlds. After trying to make it last for a year, they finally called it quits. Mike filled a notebook with his feelings about that protracted end and filed it away. “Mike had a lot of respect for her, so he didn’t want to get right into a relationship,” Buchanan remembers. “But we knew we liked each other.”

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Months before Buchanan visited Urbana, Lamos went over to the apartment Mike and Holmes shared—“interesting guys living in the least interesting shithole,” he says, laughing, “like unit 13 behind the fucking dumpster.” His duo practices with Holmes had gone well enough that they asked Mike if he might like to join.

Mike remembered the way Villareal had retuned his guitar in Cap’n Jazz. Tim, too, had taken to dispatching the occasional mixtape to his younger brother. He remembers Stereolab and Steve Reich, Nick Drake and the Red House Painters. They could tell something was different about those guitars, too, so they experimented, turning tuning pegs until they found riffs they liked. They would play different lines at different times, waiting for them to intersect the way a piece of Reich’s phase music might resolve. The quest became addicting.

“Me and Holmes were both still learning our instruments, so our heads were down, concentrating on whatever stupid idea we had,” says Mike, who didn’t even bring a guitar to college and initially borrowed Holmes’ cheap Mexican Telecaster. “We would sit on the couch, watch TV, and practice. We just played these parts over and over until we were like, ‘Oh my god, it worked.’”

Holmes, Lamos, and Mike all possessed what can be called a useful naivete. The guitarists were playing intricate parts whose mechanics they were still trying to understand. And Lamos was a rather new drummer, so when the pair would show up at his house with a new riff sorted, he was responding intuitively.

“Because I was still learning drums, I didn’t have to pretend to have a beginner’s mind or a child’s eye or whatever—I had it,” says Lamos, tapping out rhythms on a table as he describes how they would discuss the way each piece would converge. “Each part was allowed to develop. And we were trying not to be noisy.”

Indeed, American Football’s sound was a reaction on multiple fronts. For Mike, the first was personal. He’d played in Tim’s bands for nearly a decade at that point, ceding the final decisions about direction to him. He found his brother’s impulse for obfuscation and misdirection frustrating. “Look, I like every ballad I’ve ever heard—any genre, give me the ballad,” he says, smiling. “American Football was weird time signatures, but it was all palatable. Tim was denying me being able to satisfy that, so I dove in.”

The second was about genre: They wanted nothing to do with “emo.” Sure, they had friends and family whose stock-in-trade that had become, but they wanted to be pretty and clear, like a bunch of bells. It was, says Holmes, a credo of sorts: We are not an emo band. “We thought we were doing the opposite,” he remembers. “We said let’s do Music for 18 Musicians on guitars and drums.”

They were, for a time, purely instrumental. Mike had wedged his way into The One Up Downstairs in order to sing, but he was reluctant to try it with American Football. Their first several shows were wordless and rather painful, one noodly song that they sometimes couldn’t figure out how to end followed by minutes of tuning that could feel like an infinity followed by another noodly tune that they also didn’t know how to end.

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Lamos encouraged Mike to sing, and Holmes wrote lyrics for some of the songs himself. But he soon realized he couldn’t sing and play these intertwining guitar lines at the same time. Mike could, and he still had that notebook of break-up poetry. He’d already used some of it in The One Up Downstairs. Why not just sing that, even if it was already a few years old?

“The Smiths, The Cure—I just thought all music had to be sad, that all music had to be … earnest?” Mike says. “I never got into pop-punk, any band of goofballs. That itch gets scratched by hanging out with actual humans or watching sports. If I want to fuck off, I can fuck off.”

Buchanan didn’t think it was weird that her new boyfriend was singing songs about his former girlfriend. This was simply who he was: a sentimental Midwestern man who loved his mom. “It hurt a little to know that there was music being written about somebody else, but I knew where it was coming from,” she says. “He struggled with not being in this relationship with this person he had a lot of love and responsibility for. But I knew which songs were not about me and which ones are.”

Around the time American Football recorded a three-song EP in June 1998, they tried to tour. Lamos had booked three shows, maybe in Champaign and Danville and a rare out-of-state appearance in St. Louis. Memories differ about that last show, but the consensus is it was a disaster that nevertheless confirmed a true lack of professional ambitions. They roasted in the parking lot all day, waiting for the venue’s early show to end. When it did, everyone left. American Football set up for an audience of zero. Mike thinks they played to a crowd of heavy metal hecklers who came late, but Holmes is pretty sure they bailed altogether. Mike remembers Holmes and Lamos playing the Beatles all the way home, talking incessantly about how great they were

“I thought, ‘I am never doing this band again.’ What am I even doing this for?” he remembers. “I could be at home having sex with my girlfriend or whatever college kids do.”

But they kept playing, anyway, writing enough songs that they realized they needed to make a record before they all left Champaign. Holmes and Mike would graduate in the summer of 1999, and Lamos was deep in his doctorate program. They went back to Private Studios, a drywalled garage with a little live room and a postage-stamp control room. They cut nine songs in a little more than a day, doing no more than three takes of anything. Mike went back later to do his vocals. The recording cost $2,028.88, paid for by Polyvinyl. The band told the Lunsfords they’d finished a full album but that they were done, with no intention of promoting it. “It was just a marker in time—this is a band that existed, and they’re not going to exist anymore,” Holmes remembers. “But these songs are cool.”

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When Polyvinyl released American Football’s self-titled debut and farewell in September 1999, Mike was already back in Buffalo Grove, living with his mom and working on the songs that would become his debut as Owen.

Just after 5 p.m. on March 23, 2014, Mike sent an email he’d never imagined he would send: “fuck it,” he wrote, with Holmes, Lamos, his manager, and part of the Polyvinyl staff on copy. “let’s play some American Football shows.”

Mike insists that he didn’t know his manager at the time, Chase Igliori, had reached out to a few booking agents on the then-explosive American festival circuit to see if they might book American Football. There was strong interest, plus the promise of lucrative offers. Not long after those offers arrived, Tim and Donna went to Mike’s house for lunch. He mentioned that a few people had made bids for American Football shows, but he wasn’t interested in revisiting that part of his past. Tim asked him how much the gigs paid. When Mike answered, Tim and his mom stared at him. “I said, ‘Fuck you, Mike. You have these kids. Go play those reunion shows,’” Tim remembers, laughing. “He was being an ass—‘I’m doing my own thing now. I don’t look backwards.’ My mom scolded him.”

Mike didn’t believe anyone cared. For a dozen years, he’d often toured as Owen, playing solo shows to modest crowds who would occasionally shout out “Never Meant,” a song he didn’t really know how to perform. LP1’s popularity and influence had ballooned; Mike knew that. But a few decent royalty checks and the occasional kid in Tallahassee shouting out the title of a 15-year-old song didn’t seem like enough pretext for a full reunion.

“If anybody gives you a different answer, they’re lying. There was no way in the world anyone needed to see American Football ever again,” he says. “Our shows just so barely happened. I can’t stress it enough. We weren’t good at what we were doing, and the songs weren’t finished. Nobody saw it, and nobody cared if they saw it.”

Ego aside, there was another problem: He didn’t really have a relationship with Holmes or Lamos. Mike had recently gone to a Chicago Bulls game with Holmes and some old friends, but that was an exception. Soon after Holmes graduated, he moved to the Chicago suburbs and got married. He and Lamos played together in a band called The Geese for several years, but that was very part-time, one of them always commuting to write or rehearse.

When Lamos finished his doctorate in 2004, he taught in Illinois for a year, then moved to Boulder, to become a professor at the University of Colorado. When Holmes had the first of his three kids, he checked out of music entirely, taking a job at the international payroll company ADP. They only knew anyone cared about American Football because of the occasional royalty check.

“I grew up poor, working-class. When I graduated, I had loans,” Holmes tells me. “It was inconceivable to me to be a musician and have a family. I didn’t think that’s a thing you could do.”

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In Colorado, Lamos was still playing music, but the scene and context were entirely different. He resented that he was no longer in that kind of tight-knit community, playing in multiple projects with people he considered friends. “I was actually really bitter I wasn’t in that world anymore,” he admits, “but that had everything to do with me and nothing to do with them.”

The nature of the first offer certainly helped. In 2005, Seth Fein—a Champaign native who had played in bands before he began booking them—started the Pygmalion Festival. He’d known of American Football during their two years of existence, but he didn’t see them. He loved the single “The One With the Tambourine” but mostly thought their debut was just OK.

But as he started to book Owen shows in Champaign, people invariably began to ask him why he didn’t just book American Football. Owen became such a perennial act at Pygmalion that, one year, a local band reprinted the fest’s poster to only include Owen and their own name. Mike became a friend, and, each year, Fein would make the same joke. “We’d drink,” Fein remembers, “and I’d be like, ‘Can you get fucking American Football back together? Then we’d sell some tickets, buddy.’”

On March 20, 2014, American Football’s agent called Fein to tell him that might be possible. Fein made an offer that day, and he made it personal, too: “It’s for the community. It’s for Polyvinyl,” he wrote, even agreeing to secure the American Football House if Mike wanted to stay there with his family. They sealed the deal on March 24, the day after Mike sent his “fuck it.” bulletin.

Mike, however, had one more caveat: They couldn’t sound so noodly and thin this time. His cousin Nate had to play bass.

Nate had grown up idolizing his older cousins Tim and Mike. His sister, Katie, had a 7-inch compilation with a Cap’n Jazz song, and he thought it was so cool that people in his family had a band of their own. But he didn’t see them often. After growing up in a tiny Illinois farming town, he moved to a Minneapolis suburb and only encountered his cousins when they came through on tour. As he started playing guitar, forming bands of his own, and going to a performing arts high school, he realized that it wasn’t simply cool his cousins played music. He realized that their music was special. “I thought everyone had cousins who were in great bands,” Nate, 45, tells me in late December in a Brooklyn bar close to his apartment, laughing so hard he has to catch his breath. “But no, I’m the only one.”

When Polyvinyl released American Football’s debut, Nate was 19, fresh out of high school. He’d purchase their EP, but a friend burned him a copy of this. The rest of his family was in Nebraska, so he was living in a little apartment, going to recording school. He would put his CD-R in his Discman, put a cassette adapter into his tape deck, and drive around for hours, listening. “It’s so modest. They weren’t trying to muscle up or be cool or be tough,” says Nate. “It was like reading someone’s diary.”

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At some point, Mike admitted he was tired of playing secondary drums in Joan of Arc. It was too physical and gross. He was over ending every night soaked in sweat. He knew “cousin Nate” was already playing in Minneapolis, so he asked if he might come to Chicago and learn Joan of Arc’s songs. Nate enthusiastically agreed, arriving in January 2003. During the next decade, he would occasionally ask Mike about American Football.

“Whenever it was brought up, it seemed like something that would never happen again, an impossibility,” Nate remembers. “The Steves were just these mysterious guys I never met who had moved on, carrying on with their lives.”

Late that April, the Steves and the Kinsella cousins convened in Chicago for the first American Football rehearsals in 15 years. Lamos and Mike hadn’t seen each other in a long time, and Lamos didn’t know Nate at all. It was a little awkward, Lamos says, but they were good enough for a start. That night, Lamos had been asleep for two hours when his phone rang. He and his wife, Tracy Pearce, were expecting their second child on June 1, in five weeks. The baby was on the way. He raced to the airport, abandoned a car in the parking lot, and ran among the ticket counters, begging for the first flight to Denver. An agent took pity and found him a seat. He made it home 40 minutes before his daughter was born.

“The fact that we’re still married after that kind of shit? That’s good,” Lamos says, beaming. “That’s a testament to my wife, Tracy.”

The minute Mike Garzón learned that American Football might reunite, he demanded a job.

It was April 15, and Garzón’s feisty band, Hellogoodbye, was playing at Chicago’s Lincoln Hall. Owen and Hellogoodbye shared the same manager, so Mike had stopped by the venue to have a drink and say hello. In six days, American Football would announce its first shows in 15 years, so this was a chance for Mike to ask any last questions. As they walked down the stairs, the manager, Igliori, teased Garzón with speculation: “You know, there’s a murmur of American Football reuniting.”

If it happened, Garzón insisted, he wanted to be the guitar tech. Garzón had been fascinated with American Football since he was a teenager, by the way they stood out from the pop-punk or emo bands he thought crowded Warped Tour. “I’m a drummer-turned-self-taught guitar player, and in American Football, almost everyone’s a drummer,” Garzón, 42, tells me. “They were doing things that made sense to me as a drummer but not as a guitar player. They were dealing with a level of magic I didn’t understand, this unattainable magic.”

He soon learned, though, how ordinary it all seemed. Holmes showed up to the first rehearsal with the same Mexican Telecaster with which he’d recorded LP1. They were going to play their Pygmalion homecoming and three sold-out shows at Webster Hall, but everyone had the sort of gear you’d grab at a Guitar Center and go. And after not being in a band for 15 years, they also didn’t know how to listen to one another, how to play together like they had in Lamos’ little house. During those first rehearsals, their soundman walked up to Garzón and sighed: “Boy, we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

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And by everyone’s admission, the shows were not very good—for months, maybe even years. The same problems that had plagued them in college persisted. They’d stand between songs in silence, tuning guitars that Garzón had already prepared. They’d forget to turn their volume down before unplugging an instrument, sending noise through the house.

They had a new issue, too: booze. In college, Mike wasn’t really a drinker, still bothered by the struggles he’d seen in Cap’n Jazz and at home. But each of these shows held more people than American Football had ever played for combined, so he self-medicated. “I had been doing the exact same thing to nobody,” he says. “I went from 15 years of nothing has changed to what the fuck is this? It was exciting, but I drank too much and played terribly.”

In the crowd, no one seemed to care. “Those early shows were trainwrecks,” Nate admits, “but the audience was so forgiving. They never thought it would happen.”

Garzón had been on the road with bands for years at that point, and he thought he knew what it meant to watch people cry from the stage. The Webster Hall shows changed his expectations of how a band could make people feel. “It was 30 to 50 people out there not just crying, but ugly crying. It felt like a group therapy session,” he remembers. “It was all these people who had been waiting for so long, and it was just a giant release. The shows were magical, even if they were executed, eh, OK.”

When Fein booked the band to play Pygmalion, he suggested they do 30 shows, that they go and meet the massive fandom they had unexpectedly accrued. Their booking agent only laughed—Mike would never go for that. But that December, they did a California run, then January in Chicago. There was Europe in May, Japan in June, Australia in July. American Football was suddenly burning almost every vacation day Holmes had and filling every break Lamos could get at the University of Colorado.

“The first time we played Primavera, I didn’t take a day off. I worked on Friday, flew to Barcelona, played a show, went home, and worked on Monday,” Holmes says. “I wouldn’t mention it to anyone at work for the first two years.”

Alexa Viscius

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When American Football decided to play its first shows in 15 years, there was no talk about a next record. Making music together was in the past; they were simply honoring it for the people who cared. But it was fun, and more people than expected really cared. Igliori encouraged them not only to make a record but to do it quickly, too. “He said that we should ride the wave that we were on,” Nate remembers. “And he said we could make money playing music—imagine that. That sounded pretty good, but I regret that I didn’t push back more.”

Every member of American Football uses the word ‘rushed’ when they talk about LP2, released in late October 2016. It was clear from the cover—an interior shot of the American Football House with the front door suggestively cracked, like an invitation or an exit sign—that it was an extension of the past. The songs were mostly good and occasionally great, but it sounded like the work of a band still stuck in the shadow of its lore.

The dynamic had changed, too. Instead of walking a block or two to the studio, they decamped to Omaha to work. And that pressure-free approach to recording in one room vanished. Holmes learned only after it was too late that Mike had redone some of his guitar lines, fixing what he heard as errors. It felt clinical, Holmes says, like a bunch of guys still getting to know each other trying to be something.

Mike doesn’t disagree. It was a mistake to make something new before they had established their own identity. But for the first time in all their lives, they had an actual audience with clear expectations: Just be American Football—maybe forever this time?

“It’s hard to play the ignorance card when you’re in your 30s and have been making records your whole life. But I don’t think any of us knew what we were doing,” Mike says, shrugging. “We were old enough to make our own decisions, but it was impressed upon us that this is the way real bands work.”

In the summer of 2019, Mike wanted to take his family of four on vacation.

He and his wife, Ryan, had endured a recent rough patch. Mike broke down that spring and requested couples therapy; he wanted to talk about the imbalances he sensed in their marriage and the thoughts he sometimes had about getting out. They were making progress, he remembers. He suggested they all go to Japan together before American Football began a two-week Asian tour in support of LP3, the lush and guest-heavy album they’d released in March. The money was good enough for the Kinsella family to indulge a little.

Each night, they’d go to dinner and back to the hotel before Mike ventured out to play an Owen show. Near trip’s end, he stumbled home in the rain with his guitar after a late night with a friend and went to bed. He’s had an uneasy stomach for two decades, so he was up early in the bathroom when Ryan began pounding on the door. She’d found out that, for the better part of two years, Mike had been having an online relationship. “I thought I had found my rock bottom, and we were working our way up,” he tells me (as—and I’m not kidding—Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey” begins to play in Lottie’s). “And then, holy fuck, there’s rock bottom.”

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Mike and Ryan met at a miserable Owen show 15 years earlier. He and Buchanan had broken up as friends two years earlier. He was opening for Chicago pop-punk bros Spitalfield at the Metro, happily taking the $200 since he assumed no one would show. But the house was packed with teenagers who didn’t care about his sad songs and chatted the entire time. “I said, ‘Fuck you guys. I’m not getting paid enough for this shit,’” he remembers. “‘You guys watch—I’m gonna be your high-school history teacher next year. I’m going to remember each and every one of you.’”

He cut the set short. Backstage, a woman asked him if he really taught high school history, because she did. That was Ryan. He asked her out in front of her boyfriend (accidentally), and they went on a date a month later. They got married in 2006 and had their first kid, a daughter, in 2009. She had a stable job in a great school district. He wanted to cook her three meals a day, take care of the kids, make his introspective Owen records, and occasionally tour. “It seemed like a good business deal for both of us,” he says.

The return of American Football, Mike says, upended that dynamic. Mike was gone more and making more money, finally playing these songs for lots of people who were really listening. Mutual resentment festered. “I was,” he says with a sigh, “getting punished for trying to do this band.”

And then, sometime in 2017, Justine Fallon followed him on Twitter. A decade younger than Mike, Fallon was a hairdresser in Florida struggling with her own marriage. She wasn’t some Kinsella-family superfan. She’d once seen Owen open for mewithoutYou, once had a boyfriend who adored Cap’n Jazz, and didn’t really care about American Football. She just thought Mike was funny online.

“We formed this friendship, and then it became, ‘Oh, I don’t want to stop talking to this person,’” Justine tells me. “We were both in relationships that weren’t fulfilling, and it just kept going and going.”

After Mike’s family left Japan, he went to the airport and waited for the rest of American Football to arrive. He didn’t know if he’d have a family when he returned to Chicago, so he made a decision: He was going to do the next two weeks sober, his longest stint without a drink in two decades. “I told him that, if he wanted a sober buddy, I would do that,” Nate says. “He said he needed to remember this, that he wanted to go through it. But he doesn’t remember any of those shows, because he was such a wreck.”

When Mike got back to Chicago, he moved into the basement. They tried couples therapy again, but, rather than help, it simply showed them that the issues in their marriage were insurmountable. When they dated in college, Buchanan remembers, Mike would disavow his favorite sports stars for cheating. He’d become that guy.

“I put myself in a position to talk to somebody else, to meet somebody else. That’s not cool. I’m ashamed of it,” he tells me. He has repeatedly reiterated this to Holmes, who is now going through a divorce of his own. “I wouldn’t change it, because the outcome was so fucking awesome, but I would change how I did it. This guy now would have spoken up and ended the marriage at the right time for the right reasons.”

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The outcome is that Fallon and Mike have been together for seven years. Late in 2019, he flew down to meet her mother while Fallon was working; in 2020, she became so familiar with $39 Spirit Airlines flights from Tampa to Chicago that the bartender near the gate soon knew her life story. She moved to Chicago in December 2020 and, at first, got her own apartment, moving in with Mike in 2022. During the pandemic, they learned how to give one another stick-and-poke tattoos, including the Vans logo she put on his foot. When she tells me about how he cries not only at every movie but at those “Golden Slumbers” Airbnb commercials, she makes them both sound like teenagers.

Still, it wasn’t easy at first, especially with Mike’s kids. Fallon, after all, had never intended to be a parent. “It was very hard for [his son], specifically, because though his parents weren’t living in the same place, maybe it seemed like they weren’t divorced,” Fallon says. “But when someone else is brought in and it’s like ‘I have a girlfriend now,’ that’s very jarring. He was very angry, understandably so.”

Mike and Fallon live two blocks from Ryan in Chicago, and the kids go back and forth. Mike still visits every morning before school to make their breakfasts and pack their lunches. “They’re 16 and 13—they don’t need that,” his mom, Donna, tells me. “And he says, ‘They don’t need me, but I need them.’”

Fallon arrived in Chicago right on time in December 2020, since another pillar of Mike’s life had fallen apart only weeks earlier. American Football had broken up for a second time.

On and off throughout 2020, American Football’s core four would convene on Zoom to exchange song ideas and offer feedback about new possibilities. With Mike’s divorce, there were, of course, a lot of feelings to sort through. And there was new artistic momentum, too: LP3 represented a clear break with the past, with new textures and dynamics seeping into that latticework of guitars. The American Football House, tellingly, wasn’t on the cover.

But Lamos had a rough time making that record. He was a distinctive drummer, after all, in a band full of them, so he sometimes lost arguments about what worked best without even knowing it. He’d sometimes return after playing a part to hear that it had been shifted, snapped to a grid he didn’t like. Though he now thinks Mike was right, it stung, too, when the singer would say things like “You go out and make 10 solo records, and then we can talk about what’s right.”

On a call just before Thanksgiving, Mike asked Lamos to add a crash cymbal at the start of a beat. Lamos flashed back to those LP3 sessions and the feeling that he was losing control over his own input. Mike remembers the outburst this way: “Fuck you, Mike. You’re drunk. You ruin more shows than you don’t. I quit this band. Fuck this shit.” Lamos threw his cell phone against a gas fireplace in his Colorado home and fumed, ignoring Mike’s messages but immediately apologizing to everyone else. As Mike’s marriage ended, he tells me, Lamos had been a supportive friend, a good listener. But the outburst made him feel like the end of his marriage had, like he was the true failure point.

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Still, Lamos was serious: He was out. The period had been a pressure cooker for the drummer. Aside from typical Covid anxiety, he was starting a new university job that felt like a mountain of new responsibility. His mother’s second husband was dying. But his frustrations with American Football had steadily accreted. A professor who cops repeatedly to being “real straight-laced, real uptight,” he was tired of what he calls “The Roving Frat Show” of American Football. What’s more, he resented the way the music industry often made a professionally successful father of two feel like a kid.

“I don’t think it was conscious, but there was a narrative with Holmes and me that went, ‘You guys are lucky to be here. You don’t know what you’re doing,’” Lamos says. “The whole music industry party could feel like, ‘Quiet! The big people are talking now!’”

Lamos began telling people during the holidays that he’d left American Football, but he waited until July 2021 to announce it in a grateful public letter that attributed the decision to a changing “life situation.” Mike and Nate, meanwhile, were turning some of those ideas into their debut as the duo Lies. Every few months, Lamos would ask Amber Leone—the band’s manager since 2018, after Igliori resigned due to sexual assault allegations—for the paperwork to finalize the split. She took her time. Months before the Lies record was even announced, Lamos was already talking about returning. On December 7, 2022, Leone’s 30th birthday and the day she got engaged, Lamos called to say he was back in after almost exactly two years out.

“He said, ‘You know, I’ve been trying to do this on my own, and it’s really hard. I’ve had some humbling moments,’” Leone remembers. “‘I miss the guys. What do you think they would think of me coming back?’ I told him they would love that.”

American Football returned to the stage in June 2023, playing another secret set at Chicago’s Beat Kitchen, where they’d done the same in 2014. They toured England and the South that summer, but, more importantly, they all reconvened in Chicago in October and then again in January to start writing, trying to turn the ideas they passed to each other online into the songs that would become LP4.

During our interviews, Mike tells me multiple times how special he thinks Lamos is as a drummer but that he thinks Lamos maybe doesn’t like him very much, either. They are, after all, very different—Lamos the maximum-effort perfectionist and professor, Mike the kid who could hear a song once and play it on whatever instrument he had in hand. When I tell Lamos that Mike believes that, he frowns at first.

“This makes me think that Mike and I should talk. I agree 100%, though I love him and I know he loves me, too,” Lamos says, smiling. “This is a marriage—a marriage of a bunch of dudes who are also getting divorced.”

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On a Saturday afternoon, Garzón, the guitar tech, walked into a green room and panicked. Where was Mike?

It was September 2024, and American Football had been in England for four days, part of a run of major shows meant to commemorate the 25th anniversary of their debut. This was going to be the biggest—a sold-out show at the Roundhouse, in London. There was a leftover bottle of Campari from the previous night’s gig in Bristol, so Garzón had slipped it into his backpack and dropped it off in the dressing room before soundcheck. Two hours later, he realized his mistake. Soundcheck had been rough. Mike had been distracted, checking his phone a little too often. Garzón could smell booze, and figured Mike had drained the whole thing in a fit of nerves.

When Garzón saw that the bottle was indeed empty, he went looking for the singer. His plan was to stay by his side until showtime, moderating Mike’s alcohol intake by matching him and giving him water whenever he had the chance. Instead, he found Fallon and Mike at a nearby bar, maybe two beers in. This was normal. Mike was … fine? Someone had simply moved the Campari to a different room, and the singer hadn’t touched it. Garzón told Mike about the story. “He said, ‘I’m sorry, but that’s a very possible thing,’” Garzón remembers—“that” being Mike getting too loaded to play well.

Everyone in American Football had seen this pattern: There would be a bad soundcheck or a big show, and Mike would drown his anxiety, thereby increasing the chances it all went badly. After an early anniversary show, Nate called a band meeting and demanded that they get it together, that they’d worked too hard to throw these shows. And yet, a few months later, their second Primavera appearance ended in disaster. It was a confluence of breakdowns—new in-ear monitors that hurt, a video screen that failed, a rainstorm, Bikini Kill pounding away nearby. All that should have been manageable.

“Instead of pushing through, it all just fell onto itself,” Garzón says, frowning. “He stopped playing, wasn’t singing, and was sitting on the edge of the stage, crying.”

Mike cops to all of this. He knows that the shows have often gotten sloppy, and he shoulders the blame. Some people have floated the idea of a sober tour, but he doesn’t seem eager for that, even when Nate tells him those Asian shows were good. “When I’m not touring, I still drink a lot, because I need to keep my tolerance up to play a good show,” he tells me not long before I leave Lottie’s. He’s going to stay and have another drink as he works on mixes of new Owen songs. “And when I’m touring, I drink a lot so I can drink a lot at home. I mean, I drink a lot!”

He rationalizes this, he tells me, because he’s available for his kids in a way his father wasn’t for him and Tim. “I’m the opposite of my dad—I hope,” he says. “They know I’m here.” And as long as he’s there, he thinks he’s fine. But at least half of the two-dozen people I spoke to for this story brought it up as a concern. Nate cried when he talked about it. Donna worries. Villareal—the Cap’n Jazz guitarist that Mike once compared to the devil and who has been sober for more than three years—said he “will be fucking right there for him” when he’s ready to quit. And after Tim spoke to me about his younger brother’s habits off the record, he emailed to ask that I put his comments on the record, because he didn’t want to be associated with that behavior anymore: “Their relationship with drinking as a whole band absolutely fucking disgusts me. They think the world is a frat hazing.”

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But American Football has changed. Lamos stopped drinking 18 months ago, not long after turning 50. He thought about his late father and how his 50th birthday felt like the last chance he had to stop drinking, how he’d wanted his dad to know his kids. And the band now hinges on a confederation that calls itself, playfully, “The Secret Central Sound Society,” three members who talk every night about what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future. It includes Nate, Garzón, and Cory Bracken, the vibraphonist who joined in the fall of 2016. Garzón is no longer just the guitar tech but instead a full-time touring member. Being the newcomers, they have a different perspective on what it means to love American Football.

“Taking this thing seriously and having it tuned up and honed in is what I call the ‘preservation of the sacred moment,’” Bracken, 39, tells me, as his cats, Rigby and Ripley, wrestle on the bed of his tiny Queens apartment. “I have this unique perspective in the band, where I’m playing shakers and checking out the audience and realizing, as goofy as this is a lot of times, it is really powerful to a lot of people.”

Bracken is an anomaly in American Football. He is a classically trained percussionist and a serious composer who makes ambient and noise music as Real Adult. He also grew up adoring the output of the Kinsella family, sometimes playing vibraphone to American Football songs and daydreaming about how it would feel to perform this material with this mysterious, broken-up band.

When that opportunity came through his collaborations with Nate, he first fell into the trap of tours feeling like vacations for a band of working dads. He’d pound whiskey before shows or finish a gig and wonder how his riser was littered with so many Solo cups and beer bottles. He’d say crass things to the crowd while the band fiddled with its tunings between songs. But he slowly started building little instrumentals to serve as interludes, like transitional music between film scenes. He’s curbed his drinking before and during the show, too. “You’re compromising that sacred moment if you’re blotto-ed,” he tells me, laughing.

Perhaps most important, though, is Bracken’s push for more rehearsals, for starting to plan a show a year in advance. He’s been in this band for nearly a decade and seen shows fall apart in almost every way imaginable. American Football used to cobble big gigs together in a matter of weeks or days; they’ve been rehearsing for the LP4 tour since December, five months before it begins. Fallon will sing on several songs, boosting the onstage count to seven. The lighting, the electronics, the setlist—there are more moving parts, more failure points.

“This isn’t about me partying or having fun or fucking around on stage. It’s not a vacation party,” says Bracken. “It’s disrespectful to be underprepared in delivering this moment to people or to be too drunk to be in the mood.”

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On a gray and cold evening in the middle of January, I spent the night alone in the American Football House.

I’d come back to Illinois to spend hours talking to Mike, Holmes, and the people at Polyvinyl. I had some spare time before those talks began and had been generously offered a friends-and-family rate on 704 West High Street; I figured I’d take the opportunity to spend a little time in this place that had become an unwitting character in an uncanny rock saga more than a century after it was built. I am a guy, after all, who loves to visit battlefields, studios, and even sites where something important used to be, just for the chance to breathe in a little atomized history. Back in October at the party, Michael Thies—a longtime Polyvinyl employee who is now the label’s sales director—told me about how his great-great grandfather lived and possibly died in this house, eventually showing me some paperwork that potentially proved it. The house, the band, the label: It all seemed like a Gordian knot of past and present, a byproduct of predestination.

But after I arrived late that afternoon, I didn’t really know what to do. Even with the basement where Chris Strong lived when he took the cover photo sealed shut, the house feels surprisingly big—four beds, a green sectional that could sleep two more, three TVs, a sprawling backyard perfect for a half-pipe and a hundred townies. It was and is a spot to be shared by friends, so I felt out of place. It was hard to connect whatever magic had actually happened here, let alone what American Football has become, with the feeling of being in these rooms now for rent. So I ran around campus in several layers, ate duck at the restaurant Strong’s dad owned for decades, and watched a klezmer band in the bar that Lies played the night everyone started joking about buying the house. I got back after dark, still mystified about what I was looking for here.

At last, I opened a cabinet beneath the TV in the living room and found a clue: a beautiful Grundig stereo receiver wired to Bluetooth and to two speakers hidden in the same console. I connected my phone, turned the volume knob to the far right, and—of course you know how this sentence ends—played LP1. I strolled through the place, the drums that Lamos played a few blocks away 27 years earlier rattling the old walls, and into the front yard, leaving the door open just enough for me to hear. On the famous cover, the light coming through the bottom half of the window is pink. It looks like a mystery, something suggestive to puzzle out.

Jenn Pelly, the astute rock critic who has written more thoughtfully about emo over the years than perhaps anyone else, told me about how the window, paired with the light of suburban dusk around it, reminded her of being a teenager on Long Island—angsty, daydreaming, stuck indoors. Here were those feelings in a frame. Seth Fein, the festival booker who landed the first reunion show, told me about falling in love for the first time in Champaign around the time the photo was taken, about how his girlfriend introduced him to emo, about how badly it hurt when it ended.

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“That window has always been like, ‘What’s going on in there?’ We all know what’s going on in there, and it’s probably not good,” Fein said. “But it will end up good if you let the experience teach you something.”

The truth, Strong tells me, is that one of his roommates had an iguana who required a heat lamp to stay alive. Those things morph into pink washes when they’re photographed. And the image itself was a nod to the cover of The Age of Octeen by Braid, the local band who transformed him and his scene. It’s a simple photograph of an ordinary house full of ordinary people doing ordinary things—and so, a complex mirror for examining little bits of our own story.

It makes me think about two anecdotes that Buchanan, in love with Mike during those American Football years, told me. In 2024, she went to Las Vegas with some old pals to see American Football at the festival Best Friends Forever. American Football played “Honestly?” in front of a video of the house, and she told some strangers it was about her. (“I mean, kind of? I don’t know,” Mike says, laughing.)

Around that time, she was walking to her car on a Saturday afternoon in San Francisco when she noticed that a few middle-school kids had hopped a fence to skate. The music they were listening to sounded familiar—it was, after all, “Honestly?” Not to sound like an emo kid writing on LiveJournal circa 2003 after hearing American Football for the first time, but the song isn’t just about Buchanan anymore. It’s about anyone who has ever had to look out for what love can do to you. Maybe those kids were too young to get that, but soon enough.

I stood in the yard until my favorite song on LP1 was almost done, “Stay Home.” I’ve always loved its eight-minute arc, how it makes me imagine the jazz giant Jim Hall joining a post-rock band late in life. But that night, I thought about how American Football had ignored the title’s warning and maybe missed the wisdom Mike half-moans in the song’s only verse, too: “Don’t leave home again/If empathy takes energy/’Cause everyone feels just like you.” That is, the world and its feelings will fuck you up if you stick around long enough. 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. Maybe they’re getting there? Maybe they never will?

I woke up early the next morning and left the house, headed two hours north for Chicago. Bad weather was inbound, and Mike and I had plans to meet at a bar near his apartment in Roscoe Village. As I drove, I fast-forwarded to the present, listening to LP4 on repeat.

There will be, for sure, a contingent of American Football acolytes who hate it. Where their first album can feel modest to a fault, this one is enormous. It begins with a vocal drone courtesy of Nate and ends with a gorgeous math-rock tangle, the guitars and drums drawn like a nest of wires. With Bracken’s help, there are moments during “Desdemona” where they actually sound like Steve Reich’s most transcendent pieces. The coos of Wisp’s Natalie R. Lu, born the year LP1 turned five, underline the prog ambitions of “Wake Her Up,” a song with as many twists and turns as American Football’s saga itself.

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LP4 also reminds me of Kris Kristofferson’s infamous advice for Joni Mitchell upon hearing Blue: “God, Joan, save something of yourself.” Mike is so open about his demons here—the way he failed in his marriage, the hidden darkness inside his abiding Midwestern niceness, the thoughts of just checking out early—that Sonny DiPerri, the album's producer, asked Nate if he should be worried about Mike. The references to slit wrists during “Bad Moons” surprised him. “I don’t … think so?” Nate responded. “I think it’s good he’s getting it out this way.”

The question of how people might feel about LP4 came up repeatedly with Mike, and his answer was always a variation on the same. “I used to be insecure, but now it’s like, ‘You cannot kill me. I’m dead,” he said. “I got divorced with kids, and I’m responsible for that. I’m dead.” He’s got a new thundercloud tattoo on his skull, a reference, he told me, to a perpetual brain fog that he believes stems from long Covid. When he told me this, though, I couldn’t help but think about this very nice Midwestern musician who is suddenly being paid somewhat well to brood in public, to wear his innermost feelings as a skull tat.

After talking for several hours about the darkest corners of his life, Mike asked if I wanted to go see his son play basketball. We drove three blocks, trying not to slide on sheets of fresh Chicago ice, and bounded up the stairs to the little elementary school gym. Mike doesn’t want to be one of those parents who cheers too much or badmouths the refs, so we sat quietly, offering old-guy commentary like Statler and Waldorf.

At one point near the end of the first half, his son made a slick pass that led to a quick layup.“That’s my kid,” said Mike—true Midwest emo, all grown up, beaming and wiping something from the corner of his eye.

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