Mike Kinsella went through a divorce, struggled with alcohol, lost friends, and spent seven years wondering whether American Football had anything left to say. I’ve been wondering the same thing, since LP2 arrived in 2016 and felt like a band going through motions they no longer quite believed in.
LP4 is the answer I wasn’t sure was coming, and it’s a better one than I expected.
‘Man Overboard’ establishes the ‘sonic argument’ immediately. Steve Lamos opens on a hypnotic drum pattern, then guitars and synths arrive in layers, churning and distorted, the whole thing swelling into something dense and cinematic that sounds nothing like the band’s spare 1999 debut and doesn’t try to.
Producer Sonny DiPerri, whose previous work includes My Bloody Valentine and Nine Inch Nails, adds vibraphone, string loops and atmospheric synthesis throughout. Not everyone will want this. Those who came for the sparse geometry of that debut will find LP4 a harder listen, and that’s a legitimate response.
But the case for the denser approach is ‘Bad Moons’, an eight-minute centrepiece where Nate Kinsella’s cascading string loops build under Steve Holmes’ cyclical guitar figure while Mike spirals through his most direct confession: “I lost my way in the dark, precious time, my moral line / I lost everything in the dark, friends for life, a wilted wife.” That kind of weight needs space, and DiPerri gives it space.
‘Patron Saint of Pale’ is where the album’s emotional argument becomes most formally inventive, and it’s the track I keep coming back to. Backed by playground clapping and Lamos’ stumbling beat, Kinsella proposes settling divorce negotiations with a game of roshambo. “If you win I’ll never ask to play again / I’ll come home.”
The gap between the childlike game and the adult stakes it’s resolving is the sharpest image on the record. ‘Desdemona’ arrives shortly after: Steve Reich-inspired phased wordless vocals woven through classic American Football guitar lines, Kinsella’s voice in conversation with itself in a way that never tips into nostalgia.
The reunion era has always been conducted in LP1’s shadow, and LP4 is the first record that seems genuinely untroubled by it. The subject matter has simply moved too far. Kinsella is not a precocious student; he is a man in his late forties navigating a broken marriage, and the instrumentation reflects it: denser, less geometric, less inclined to leave gaps.
Whether DiPerri’s density occasionally functions as armour against the rawness the best moments require is a fair question, and I think on ‘Blood On My Blood’ and ‘Wake Her Up’ it does – both carry the mid-section at a slightly lower temperature without adding much new emotional information.
But the closer ‘No Soul to Save’ ends on “I’m not afraid” over giddy polyrhythmic guitars, and it lands rather than announces itself. LP4 is the sound of a band that has stopped making records about its past and started making records about its present. That distinction, finally, is everything.
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