There are no dark clouds hanging over Chicago this Wednesday morning. Actually, there are no clouds hanging there at all. The sky is a striking blue, Mike Kinsella is wearing a colorful, open shirt and sunglasses and seems much more relaxed than you would expect after an album full of darkness. It’s supposed to be 21 degrees today, he says, the Chicago Cubs, his beloved baseball team, are playing in the evening, and he already has tickets. Life can be quite beautiful. “That too is the world,” says Kinsella.
Yes, that is the world too. When you listen to his band American Football’s last album, you get to know a completely different side of this world. A very dark, a very difficult side. So full of dark clouds that it’s hard to see, let alone bear. “I like heavy music,” says Kinsella, who is responsible for the songs. “Heavy is good. Heavy music makes you think more, question things or engage with them more.”
And yet: heavy music. That feels like an understatement given the issues being negotiated. Depression. Suicidal thoughts. Shame. Pain. Darkness. With “LP4” (in the American football universe, the albums are simply numbered instead of named), the most important band of Midwestern emo has presented nothing less than a big, dark fantasy of extinction. Embedded in a playful, often light sound of almost tangible beauty, which only briefly obscures what Kinsella reveals from his deepest inner being in his lyrics. “I lost everything in the dark,” he says resignedly in “Bad Moons,” before he unfolds his self-destruction fantasies in precisely this darkness.
A new darkness is coming
“I held my breath in the dark / I welcomed death in the dark / I slit my wrists in the dark.” The song ends with a line that quietly signals hope, “I didn’t exist in the dark, until I found you in the dark,” but what he really found in the darkness remains unclear. In “No Soul To Save,” the last song on the record, an artist takes the stage and announces his final trick to the audience. The self-extinction. “I’ve nothing left to fear / Now, for my next trick, you can watch me disappear.” And in between? There is only emptiness, loneliness and heaviness.
Darkness is a new aspect in the cosmos of American football. A band whose sound you would probably have found other terms for until now. Nostalgia. Longing. Melancholy. Their songs didn’t talk about the big hits in life, not about dramatic crashes or final breaks, but about the subtle cracks in between. About that elusive melancholy that arises when you suddenly realize that even the most beautiful moments have already begun to become a thing of the past.
When American Football was formed at the end of the 1990s, its members still sat together in seminar rooms and student apartments, somewhere between everyday college life, rehearsal rooms and the vague feeling that this chapter would soon end anyway. Shortly after recording, the group practically fell apart again. “LP1”, as the debut was later to be called almost reverently, was never intended as the start of a great career. More like a final snapshot of an attitude to life, preserved in songs just before everything drifted apart.
The album came out and went down. First. But while the band was long gone, years later the Internet began to unearth this album like a forgotten relic. A small emo record gradually became a digital cult object, and a few melancholic songs about insecurity, closeness and disorientation became an entire visual language of nostalgia. “LP1” became the soundtrack of an emotional in-between state that an entire generation suddenly discovered for itself.
“Now everything seems to be getting darker and darker”
When the band got back together in 2014, it seemed less like a normal comeback than like the return of a myth that had long since become bigger than the people who originally created it. “At this age – in your early twenties – your world is only as big as your previous experiences,” Kinsella said today. “Back then, life consisted of hanging out with friends or experiencing a relationship or two. Now everything has become much bigger.” The life. But also the suffering from it.
With “LP2” they wrote another classic American football album that continued the spirit of the early days. It wasn’t until “LP3” from 2019 that American Football finally broke away from their own past. The sound opened up audibly, became wider, more atmospheric, almost shoegaze-like in places. The delicate guitar lines remained, but now seemed less like an expression of youthful insecurity than like the echo of lived experience. At the same time, the topics also shifted. Kinsella now sang about divorce, alcohol, mental health crises and getting older. And now the “LP4”. Something slipped there.
A lot has happened. A global pandemic, divorces within the band. American Football itself also separated again and yet came back together again. “But it was never a conscious decision to suddenly want to make a darker album,” shrugs Kinsella. It was probably suddenly just there. Maybe that’s because it’s not just our own world that has become more complex. But also the world that surrounds Kinsella.
“Now everything seems to be getting darker and darker. Some days I wake up and I’m completely consumed by my own feelings. Other days I feel more strongly about the state of the whole world or what other people are going through. Both are difficult,” admits Kinsella, who has found an expression for this suffering in his songs. An expression that the band wants to keep as real as possible. Perhaps this is precisely why American football still generates a strange form of closeness to this day. Their songs never seemed like perfect constructions. They often sounded more like thoughts that hadn’t yet been fully sorted.
Redemption gives way to acceptance
And perhaps that is exactly where their strength lies. “Especially in the artistic field, the things that only you can create are interesting,” notes drummer Steve Lamos, who alongside the band also works as a professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Colorado and is intensively interested in the influence of AI. “The strange peculiarities. The strange things. The experiences that only you have had. That’s exactly what makes people interesting. Take artificial intelligence,” he says. “It often ends up creating the most average, boring version of something. It always moves toward the middle. And the middle is boring as hell.” Maybe that’s one reason why “LP4” seems like the most radical album the band has made to date. Not because it has become louder, but because it allows itself to be contradictory. Heavy and playful at the same time, dark and yet full of warmth.
“We wanted to make the music sound more playful to contrast with the heavy themes,” says Kinsella. “I just hope that everything seems less one-dimensional. That it is also a little more confusing or complicated. Just like life.” Darkness, self-dissolution and finiteness lurk between the lines of “LP4”. But in front of you on this Wednesday morning is a band talking about the value of nostalgia, the future of their children and the music of Van Halen. The album may refuse redemption, “but I don’t need that redemption,” says guitarist Steve Holmes. “I accept who I am. There’s almost something religious about it. I think there’s light in the darkness throughout the album.”
There are still no clouds hanging over Chicago this Wednesday morning. The evening is going to be fantastic, says Kinsella finally, with a view to the upcoming baseball game. “As dark as some things are, in the end everyone is still just trying to live their lives. And I think that’s also in the music.” That too is the world. Yes, maybe that’s exactly what the world is.
