‘I think that there are those albums, or the music that you heard when you were younger, and they imprint on you,’ says Nate. American Football (LP3) stands with two other rare reunion successes – Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine’s mbv – as a fine example of how a band refinding one another can augment, rather than taint, their legacy. American Football is now a bona fide ongoing focus, and they are making some of the best music of their lives. ‘Somewhere along the way we moved from being a reunion band to just being a band,’ says Steve Holmes. Or, as Mike tellingly sings on ‘I Can’t Feel You”: I’m fluent in subtlety. But, definitely in this record, I keep things a little more vague.’ As on the first album, the lyrics on LP3 may seem confessional and concentrated, but the more you scrutinize them, the further their meaning slinks away. ‘The goal is to be conversational, maybe to state something giant and heavy, but in a very plain way. ‘I feel like my lyric writing has changed a lot over the years,’ says Mike. It is heavy with expectancy, revealing its ideas slowly, eliciting the hidden stories people carry around with them.
LP3 is contemplative, rich, expressive, yet with a queasy undercurrent. Mike wrote lyrics in French especially for her. The album also features Hayley Williams from Paramore on the album’s catchiest moment, ‘Uncomfortably Numb’, and Elizabeth Powell, of the Québécoise act Land Of Talk. That spirit drips into LP3, most obviously on ‘I Can’t Feel You’, a collaboration with Rachel Goswell of Slowdive. 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. But, in a strange way, there are links in LP3 with an actual post-house genre: shoegaze. It is a sign of the album’s magnitude in sound, and of the band’s boldness in breaking away from home comforts.Īmerican Football also joked that LP3’s genre was ‘post-house’, because of this very conscious visual break. Instead of the familiar house, this time the cover photo (again by Strong) features open, rolling fields on Urbana’s borders. But American Football knew that LP3 was an outside record. 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), by the photographer Chris Strong. An immediate contrast between LP3 and its two predecessors is its cover. The final result is a definite, and deliberate, stretching of the band.Īs a result, LP3 is less obviously tethered to the band’s past than the second album. There was a determination to let the songs breathe, to trust in ideas finding their own pace. This time, we were like – Ok we have these arms, let’s use them.’ The band used the same producer, Jason Cupp, and recorded the album at the same studio (Arc Studios in Omaha, Nebraska) as its predecessor – yet they approached it in a markedly different way.
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Last time, it was figuring out how to use all of our different arms. ‘We were all thoughtful about what we wanted to put out there. ‘We put a lot of time and a lot of energy into it,’ says Mike. I knew there was still more.’Įnter American Football (LP3). ‘I feel like the second album was us figuring it out,’ says Nate.
The release was widely praised, but the band members still felt like their best work was yet to come. They played far larger shows than in their original incarnation and recorded their long-anticipated second album, 2016’s American Football (LP2). The three young men who made the album – Mike Kinsella, Steve Holmes, and Steve Lamos – split up pretty much on its release.įifteen years later, American Football reunited (now as a four-piece, with the addition of Nate Kinsella). But there wasn’t a band around anymore to explain it, anyway. Like Slint’s Spiderland, or Codeine’s The White Birch, even Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, American Football asked far more questions than it cared to answer.
It was a pioneering album where lyrical clarity was obscured and complicated by the stealth musical textures surrounding it. The quietest voices can be the most durable.Īmerican Football’s original triumph, on their 1999 self-titled debut, was to reunite two shy siblings: emo and post-rock.