Photo: Alexa Viscius
On ‘LP4’ it takes Mike Kinsella seven words to say more than most songwriters manage across an entire record. “I made my bed and I lied in it,” he intones to open American Football’s latest self-titled opus, which finds the emo icons doing what they’ve always done: holding the unbearable up to the light and making it beautiful. The difference is that, this time, the wounds are fresh.
Both Kinsella and guitarist Steve Holmes have watched their marriages dissolve in the years since 2019’s ‘LP3’ and, duly, there is grief, shame, and hard-won dark humour saturating every track here.
Man Overboard is a handsome reintroduction to the core tenets of their sound: Steve Lamos’s off-kilter drumming, Nate Kinsella's bludgeoning bass, and mathy guitars are all present and correct.
Despite a superb contribution from Turnstile vocalist Brendan Yates, the ensuing No Feeling still feels like the album finding its bearings.
But then Blood on My Blood arrives, and everything shifts. Caithlin De Marrais haunts the mix like a ghost come to collect, as Kinsella addresses his infidelity with the sardonic directness that defines his best writing: “I fucked with lonely for a beat / I believed she could save me.” A vibraphone — a recurring presence throughout LP4 — lends it a child-like naivety that makes the darkness cut deeper.
Bad Moons deserves a paragraph of its own. Eight minutes long, it is perhaps the closest this band have ever come to matching Never Meant and Stay At Home from their genre-defining 1999 debut. Kinsella secrets addiction, shame, and suicidal ideation beneath a trench coat metaphor, his band eventually erupting volcanically as he reaches his lowest ebb.
What follows rarely relents. Patron Saint of Pale clatters and clashes like a mind at war with itself. Wake Her Up pairs Wisp’s spectral, angelic refrain with a Bloc Party-esque central guitar line that is the most fun this band has sounded in years. Desdemona finds Kinsella in kinship with Shakespeare’s most-wronged woman, while closer No Soul to Save is a full reckoning: defiant, exhausted, and magnificent. If ‘LP1’ remains the ceiling for American Football, ‘LP4’ is a fingernail away.
American Football Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Fri June 26 2026 - LEEDS O2 Academy Leeds
Sat June 27 2026 - LONDON O2 Forum Kentish Town
Sun June 28 2026 - LONDON O2 Forum Kentish Town
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