American Football: The One With The Feelings

“The charm of American Football’s first record is that it could have only been made by kids. This record could only have been made by adults.” 

Backstage at the Kentish Town Forum, American Football frontman Mike Kinsella smirks as I quote the band’s guitarist, Steve Holmes, back to him. Beneath dishevelled peroxide hair, he’s nursing both a black eye and a husky voice, as the buzz of a tattoo gun etches a tiger above the words ​‘No Feeling’ into his thigh.

It’s a sweltering Sunday afternoon in London. Football chants spill from the neighbouring pubs as punters clink pints and fans snake around the block hours before tonight’s sold-out show. Many weren’t even alive when American Football arrived, yet they’re discovering their own emotional rite of passage in their songs, joining those who’ve been tuned in since ​’99.

It’s impossible to overstate American Football’s cult status. I’ll confess: I only started listening to them recently, working my way backwards from LP4. Yet somehow I’m nostalgic for how they might’ve sounded on a midnight drive, melting out of the speakers of my Jeep at 18 with the windows down. All this fuelled by best mates reminiscing about how LP1 shaped them, and my own romanticising of a post-collegiate melancholy I never lived. I barely graduated high school.

Emo emerged in 1985 in Washington DC, as an emotionally charged antidote to hardcore’s machismo and punk’s prevailing nihilism. Folks called it the Revolution Summer. Thrasher Magazine was the first to coin the burgeoning genre, observing that ​“crowds were said to be left in tears after the intensity” at ​“emo-core” gigs. Pioneering bands traded breakneck aggression and anti-establishment fury for vulnerable lyricism, laying their angst bare. By the mid-’90s, that spirit evolved into Midwest emo, a collision of math rock’s angular rhythms and complex builds with suburban longing and unspoken heartache.

• Read next: Graham Sayle opens up

With LP1, American Football transformed a college experiment into a coming-of-age soundtrack that continues to transcend generations. Fast-forward to the present, and the reluctant Midwest emo architects have returned with LP4, a sonically audacious and confessional record about the dark complexities of adulthood and living with who we’ve become.

LP4, like much of American Football’s output, swerves minor keys for shimmering guitar arpeggios and shifting time signatures, set against Kinsella’s laundry list of unflinching truths: divorce, fatherhood, addiction, shame, suicide, mid-life sexual-awakening, falling in love again, and ultimately, reckoning/​rebirth.

A disquieting GQ profile compared Mike’s emotional candour to Joni Mitchell playing her viscerally diaristic Blue for Kris Kristofferson, who scoffed: ​“Jesus, Joan, save something for yourself.”

But Kinsella’s never shied away from brutal honesty. ​“On this album, I went as deep as I ever have solo,” he explains. 

On LP1 Kinsella ripped pages from his own diary and filtered them through the voices of his heroes. He wrote ​‘I’ll See You When We’re Both Not So Emotional’ in a college class, consciously emulating Depeche Mode. He credits Dinosaur Jr., The Smiths and The Sundays as formative influences, and reveals that the synth strings on LP4 are just one of more than a hundred nods to The Cure. But this time, lyrically, he’s explicitly writing as himself.

• Read next: Joy, sweat and tears at Fall Out Boy’s intimate UK shows

‘Bad Moons’ off the album is Kinsella’s most personal song to date. The sprawling, eight-minute track opens with twinkling toy piano as he revisits playground innocence, before splintering into a maelstrom of drums and a confronting post-rock crescendo.

“It’s is a Frankenstein of two different demos we’d been passing around for quite a bit. I’d been singing this sorta mantra about losing it in the dark, and melodically I knew how it fit, but I kept thinking, ​‘I’ll be clever. I’ll come up with puns.’ Then all of a sudden it was crunch time. The only option was to get fucking honest.”

On the track, Kinsella’s cracked vocals croon: ​“I lost my mind in the dark / I told all my lies in the dark / I poured my drinks in the dark / I explored new kinks in the dark / I slit my wrists in the dark…” 

“The guys hadn’t heard it,” he recalls, with a half chuckle. ​“I tracked it live in the mixing room, came out afterwards and they were like, ​‘Holy shit! You good, man?’

He adds, ​“A lot of people have said this is the darkest, heaviest music we’ve ever made, but I don’t feel that way. When people listen to this album, hopefully it resonates that I’m saying this vulnerable shit so you don’t have to. I just don’t think it’s fair to downplay lived experience just because it’s embarrassing or a little too vulnerable.”

• Read next: The cathartic roar of Vietnam’s hardcore punk scene

When I crack a joke about ​“how the other guy looks” in reference to Mike’s black eye, he confesses that it happened mid-show while changing guitars. The new ink is a tour tattoo — one most of the band got today – paying homage to bassist and cousin Nate Kinsella’s Tiger Balm obsession.

Steve and Mike reminisce about their love for London before bantering about Kinsella’s first CD being ​“Madchester’s own” Inspiral Carpets and his first tattoo being a tramp stamp that’s a Smith’s reference. Meanwhile, drummer and trumpet player Steve Lamos hypes yacht rock and Britain’s gloomy rain, then slags off the weather back home for being ​“oppressively sunny”.

Their chemistry makes it hard to imagine that, not long ago, Lamos walked away from the band altogether. ​“It took a lot to make this record. I came back, and we worked through all sorts of shit. This is the hardest we’ve ever played in our fucking lives for these shows. It’s awesome. We aren’t supposed to be here?! Doing this at this age?! We never expected this. I don’t think we’ve ever felt like a real band, and it feels like a real band now. I’m proud of that.”

• Read next: Remembering the riotous heyday of Asbury Lanes

For Lamos, LP4 feels like the culmination of everything American Football has been trying to say all along. There’s a sense of arrival, which Mike echoes: ​“It’s so cool that we ended up in this spot right now. We’re 12 years into our reunion, and at first the constant new wave of fans was truly jaw-dropping, like, ​‘What the fuck?’ Then I think we kind of faked it till we made it. Now we have this phenomenal band and crew that are actual professionals. It’s kind of like, we’re finally filling our own shoes or something.” 

Mike Kinsella is a multi-instrumentalist and hustler. When his brother Tim got held up at the skatepark, Mike seized the chance to become second guitarist in his basement band Toejam, learning the songs by listening through the floorboards and playing along. When the high school star running back dropped out of Tim’s next project, Cap’n Jazz, to focus on football, Mike’s mum Donna bought him a 16-piece drum kit for $400 bucks and he taught himself to play.

Steve Lamos started out with trumpet at six years old, spending much of his youth learning classical violin and honing his stage skills with help from his father, who would pull him onstage to perform with his polka dance band.

“I played a lot of Chicago VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) social clubs before they became famous punk rock venues,” Lamos grins. ​“The oom-pah polka beat is actually the same as the punk beat; it’s just one’s a little bit faster. That’ll probably ruin every punk song ever now. My dad hated rock music so much, so it’s the great irony of life that I get to do this after all these years.”

• Read next: How skateboarding and punk combined to create a radical, rebellious movement

Lamos picked up drums at 21, the same year he witnessed Kinsella tear it up behind a kit in Cap’n Jazz. ​“I saw Cap’n Jazz in a rust belt town called Danville, Illinois, in a divey VFW,” he says. ​“That show was totally life-changing. It felt like being hit by lightning.”

“My brother Tim sang so hard at that show that he shat his pants,” Mike interjects.

Rumour has it Tim Kinsella screamed before he talked or walked. Cap’n Jazz, his chaotic teenage DIY band, shelled out Midwest Emo with punk attitude, powered by Tim’s howling vocals, Mike Kinsella’s polyrhythmic drumming, and Victor Villarreal’s definitive guitar style: a ferocious blend of classical, Spanish and metal, that’s led to him being regarded as one of indie rock’s most inventive players.

They covered ​‘Winter Wonderland’ for A Very Punk Christmas compilation with their mum, played around 20 raucous gigs, cut their one album supernova Shmap’n Shmazz, exploded, then notoriously imploded mid-tour before it was ever released.

Soon after, Mike Kinsella turned up at one of Lamos’ shows. ​“I cornered him afterwards and said, ​‘I’m gonna join your band.’ I’d seen Steve go from jazz trumpet to drums in a matter of months, and I loved what I heard. So I pleaded, ​‘Can I sing in your band? I’ve never sung before.’”

Lamos laughs at the memory. He was a little starstruck that the charismatic kid from Cap’n Jazz wanted to front his band. They recorded three songs in an outfit called The One Up Downstairs, planned for release on Polyvinyl Records, a local label their friends ran, but it was shelved too after the band broke up in fists.

• Read next: The Midwest basement band scene of the ​’90s & ​’00s

In Champaign, Illinois, Lamos began jamming with Kinsella’s college roommate Steve Holmes. Mike was super into their riffs, and American Football was born.

Holmes added Wurlitzer to the mix, Lamos brought in his formative jazz trumpet, and Mike Kinsella anchored it with bass and Steve Reich-inspired interlocking guitar work that became one of American Football’s signatures.

They played a dozen gigs for a handful of people, recorded LP1 on the last four days of college for Polyvinyl Records on a late-’90s Digital Audio Tape, while their friend Chris Strong photographed his house (he lived in the basement at the time) for the cover, then they split as fast as the album came out.

“I feel like we jumped out of a plane with a suitcase of money, except it was old demos, and then we faked our own death,” Mike Kinsella jokes, comparing the sonic lore that followed the band to the legend of the infamous, unidentified D.B. Cooper.

In the years that followed, the band vanished largely into obscurity, largely unaware that LP1 was quietly taking on a life of its own. Mike sank his teeth into his solo project Owen, while Lamos earned a PhD in English. Meanwhile, the album reverberated across college radio, spreading through word of mouth, online forums, lucrative bootlegs and gaining huge traction on file-sharing platforms such as LimeWire and Napster to attract a global cult following. It not only became Polyvinyl’s best-selling release and one of the indie label’s top five sellers of all time, but a cornerstone of modern emo.

• Read next: Outbreak: the heart and soul of hardcore

A nudge from Polyvinyl in 2014 and a chunk of cash brought the band back together. The reunion sold out legendary Chicago haunts like the Empty Bottle and massive theatres like New York City’s Webster Hall, playing to more people than the band had during their entire original run combined. Demand for the reissue of LP1 crashed Polyvinyl’s website. They landed coveted slots at Primavera, toured five continents and signed a deal for two new records.

American Football released the highly anticipated LP2, in 2016 and LP3, in 2019 at a pivotal moment when emo’s male-dominated landscape was dissipating. The only guest vocalists on LP3 were Paramore’s Hayley Williams, Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell and Land of Talk’s Elizabeth Powell.

“I always loved the way female punk artists can yelp and sustain notes. My voice doesn’t do that. My biggest obstacle has been my voice. It’s original, but I have a limited range. The shit I could write if I didn’t have to write to my voice,” Mike confesses. ​“A lot of the time, I’ve written songs for a female voice. Harriet Wheeler from the Bristol alt-rock band The Sundays was a huge inspiration to me.”

Who are his dream collaborators? He’s already worked with them, he explains. ​“Hayley agreeing to be on LP3 was crazy. Then, of course, Rachel from Slowdive. I’m such an old-head fan of theirs, like from seventh grade, so the fact we could even ask, let alone have her say yes, was huge.”

American Football has since been sampled by PinkPantheress, covered by the likes of Ethel Cain on LP1​’s 25^th anniversary reissue, and featured Grammy-winning Turnstile frontman Brendan Yates on ​‘No Feeling’ off LP4.

The ripple effect of American Football has led to Cap’n Jazz reunion tours and music heads losing their minds over 1995 album Shmap’n Shmazz finally being pressed to wax. The official title being Burritos, Inspiration Point, Fork Balloon Sports, Cards in the Spokes, Automatic Biographies, Kites, Kung Fu, Trophies, Banana Peels We’ve Slipped on, and Egg Shells We’ve Tippy Toed Over.

Playing off their storied fandom, in 2023 the band bought and restored the iconic house depicted on the covers of LP1, LP2 and the video for ​‘Never Meant’ alongside Polyvinyl, Chris Strong and legendary skate photographer Atiba Jefferson, hoping to preserve its legacy.

White clapboard and detached, situated across the street from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the house was once home to decades of living room punk shows and has become steeped in mythology. Today, it has a Wikipedia page, is listed on Google Maps as a ​“Place of Worship” with five stars, available on Airbnb for $200 a night as a ​“creative retreat for artists”, and has become a major music landmark that attracts visitors pilgrimaging across the emo globe.

• Read next: Riot grrrl is back. Do we need it more than ever?

For the ​“housewarming”, Vans and Jefferson threw a block party, flew in pro skaters, built a half pipe and had an ​“open drum kit” which Nate and Mike Kinsella and Lamos played over a DJ set. They handed out Vans sneakers and served slabs of cake with the LP1 cover emblazoned on them.

“Victor Villarreal from Cap’n Jazz was one of the first guests to stay and write there, and that restarted his solo career. Anamanaguchi, the chiptune band, also spent a month there making an album.”

‘Never Meant’, the opening track from LP1, has taken on a seismic life of its own. It’s been embraced by Fortnite, covered on lute, bassoon and harpejji, nearly memed into oblivion and clocked viral fame on TikTok.

A phenomenon Kinsella only discovered via his daughter in their kitchen. ​“When she told me a bunch of her friends were listening to my music, I had no clue what she was talking about. We recorded the original ​‘Never Meant’ in a little garage, very live, in only a couple of takes. The blabbering you hear at the beginning is Lamos saying, ​‘We’re gonna keep the other one.’ Back then, in ​’99, we didn’t play many shows, and it was one of our poppier songs, but we recognised it had a little life to it.” 

“When we got the mixes back we thought, ​‘Let’s put ​‘Never Meant’ first so everybody hears that at least. Then if they can stick with the rest of the record, that’d be cool.’”

Backstage, Steve Lamos has long since run off to warm up. Mike and I linger in the stairwell after his tattoo as I ask one final question before navigating my way through his sea of admirers waiting outside: ​“Where do you want this new wave of fans – and the old ones – to hear LP4? And at 49, what do you hope they feel?”

“On headphones,” he concludes. “ I hope younger kids hear the technical side of it – the stuff we’ve only really figured out now as grown men, and that it inspires them to chase that. Maybe this record makes them want to push themselves harder on guitar or drums. Steve’s such a unique drummer that I know he’s influencing people. Maybe we all are… I want them to feel heard, lyrically or otherwise. To know they’re not alone.”

Tracy Kawalik is a freelance journalist. Follow her on Instagram.

Buy your copy of Huck 83 here.

Enjoyed this article? Follow Huck on Instagram for more from the cutting edge of sport, music and counterculture.

Support stories like this by becoming a member of Club Huck.