Co-produced with Sonny DiPerri, it is an ideal headphones album, designed to sound immersive and textured and meticulous, showing that those synth-strings aren’t the only thing these guys picked up from the Cure. Sonically, musically, compositionally, it’s a triumph. Thematically, it’s another story. In a powerful and disquieting GQ profile, the band and some immediate friends and family unraveled the struggles that have plagued their lucrative but life-altering reunion, a kind of cautionary tale for leveling up after settling down. Even for an artist like Kinsella who’s never been shy about autobiographical literalism in his music, some of the revelations felt shocking. “I used to be insecure, but now it’s like, ‘You cannot kill me. I’m dead,” he explained. “I got divorced with kids, and I’m responsible for that. I’m dead.”
To varying degrees, I’ve found the exploration of masculinity in Kinsella’s lyrics to be uncommonly generous and self-aware as he’s navigated middle age and newfound notoriety. Going back to the formative relationship he mourned on the first American Football record, he’s now offered a fairly comprehensive, unflinching portrait that weaves through young adulthood, marriage, and parenthood, through grief, addiction, divorce, and, eventually, falling in love again. And that last item often puts us closer to those teenage feelings than heartbreak ever can. (“I need a new muse,” he sang at the top of his 2020 solo album, The Avalanche; be careful what you wish for, he seems to preach here.)
In that sense, LP4 shares another quality with the ’90s Tom Waits and Bob Dylan records that Holmes cited: American Football have aged into somewhat unprecedented territory. An emo band whose members might otherwise now be at their most stable and content, they still seem authentically driven by unbridled, urgent emotion—only now their breakups involve lawyers, and the friendship drama occurs between people who rely on each other for income. So even if the songwriting guides the band toward the most impressive, experimental reaches of their sound, it also becomes their record most tethered to the lyric sheet and Kinsella’s role as a frontman. It’s a dizzying effect, as the polish of his surroundings never distracts from the rawness at its core.
“I honestly never planned on getting old,” Kinsella wails in “No Feeling,” repurposing a crucial word from the debut to deliver one of the record’s many gut punches. You believe him, and so by the time we reach the potentially concerning finale of “No Soul to Save,” he earns our pity as he decries choosing a life in the public eye: “I’ve made too many mistakes,” he admits over a shifting drumbeat that sounds like finding your footing while getting knocked over repeatedly by waves.
And yet, here he is, all those mistakes later, sorting through a lifetime of wreckage with guys he’s known since it was just starting to fall apart. For a band whose signature sound arrived when their ambitions were low and their goals were undefined—“If you asked us at the time if we actually finished the songs,” he confessed to Last Donut of the Night about the debut, “we would’ve said they were 70% done?”—American Football still finds their purest inspiration in figuring it all out together. As hopeless as things get, there’s comfort in knowing the story is still being written.
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