American Football
Rock City, Nottingham
11th September 2024
The emo icons celebrate 25 years of their debut record – and suggest that the best is yet to come
American Football are five songs into the first night of their UK tour when a terrace chant in their honour breaks out, the capacity crowd at Nottingham’s Rock City toasting the band’s name. It’s something we can add to the apparently endless list of unlikely things to happen to them over the past decade. “Who, us?” says frontman Mike Kinsella, with a sheepish grin. Perhaps, by now, he should have got used to this strange, miraculous second life that his old college band has enjoyed since 2014. Perhaps he never will.
Kinsella formed American Football at the University of Champaign in Illinois in the late 1990s; they released an EP in 1998 and a single, self-titled album a year later, on the then-fledgling Polyvinyl Records. Then, they graduated and went their separate ways; only Kinsella pursued a career in music, recording solo as Owen and playing in a host of influential emo outfits, including Owls and Joan of Arc. Guitarist Steve Holmes moved into the corporate life; drummer Steve Lamos pursued academia and became a professor. For a decade or so, American Football’s slender body of work languished in obscurity, cherished by a select few who either remembered it or stumbled across it; when this writer did the latter in 2008, he found precious little information about the band online. They seemed like a well-kept secret.
In the years that followed, the internet slowly opened American Football up to a new generation. They discovered it through word of mouth, or perhaps because they were fans either of Kinsella’s other work or of Polyvinyl, who had gone from strength to strength and become a byword for indie and emo excellence. A fresh wave of musicians came to take their cues from the 1999 LP, drawn in by its nakedly emotional lyrical content, by the gorgeous intricacy of its melodic arrangements, and by its indelible atmosphere, by the way it so intangibly conjured the ennui and longing of a long, midwestern summer.
By 2014, what began as a clamour for a vinyl reissue of American Football became a live reunion with a modest number of shows in the US and UK; the thinking was that all three members had other commitments that would preclude things going any further. As the band’s towering importance to emo became clear with the genre’s latest revival, though, things snowballed, and ten years later
American Football have released two further records (the first serviceable, the second magnificent), played shows in nineteen countries on five continents and now, the same week their debut record turns 25, are playing their biggest-ever gigs, here in the UK.
As if to underline their standing among the emo faithful these days, there’s an enormous queue snaking through Rock City’s storied corridors for the merchandise stand, where the band are selling, a month early, a new covers LP, where nine different artists have each taken on a track from their 1999 debut. They play the album in full for tonight’s first set, opening with the evocative EP instrumental Five Silent Miles before segueing into the languid pining of The Summer Ends.
Like much of the first album, that track unfolds gradually, reflectively: see also For Sure and But the Regrets Are Killing Me. That the crowd is rapt throughout speaks not just to the record’s emotional power but its hypnotic qualities, too; Lamos is an expressive player, his grooves providing an anchor for Holmes and Kinsella’s interlocking guitar work. Perhaps most poignantly of all is that Kinsella’s vocals speak to the passing of a quarter-century, much rougher around the edges than on record but with it, more soulful, too. Aren’t we all?
After an epic Stay Home melts into the album’s handsome coda, The One with the Wurlitzer, there’s something triumphant about Lamos’ trumpet part; who knew he’d still be dusting it off 25 years later? Never Meant, the album’s opener, inevitably closes the set; it’s become their signature song, with its lyrics, which attempt to write off a relationship in the wake of a breakup, like the band as a concept in microcosm. It precedes a second set which comprises material from the two post-reunion albums, both also called American Football and so distinguished from each other as LP2 and LP3 among the fans.
LP2 had its moments – including the beautiful My Instincts Are the Enemy, which is aired tonight – but sounded like a slightly mannered approximation of what the band thought their listeners expected out of an American Football album in 2016. LP3, on the other hand, is a modern emo classic, the group casting off the shackles and rediscovering the penchant for ambitious arrangements that so characterised LP1.
The closing one-two of Uncomfortably Numb and Every Wave to Ever Rise, then, reminds us that for all tonight’s nostalgia, American Football remain a living, breathing creative force, with their best work very possibly still in front of them. LP4 has been in the works a while; when it arrives, it’ll do so to the kind of passionate, multi-generational fanbase that was surely beyond the band’s wildest dreams a decade ago. Good things come to those who wait.
American Football can be found at their website | Facebook | Instagram
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Words by Joe Goggins: find him on X here.
Photos by Camila Cara and Mayara Giacomini, courtesy of Balaclava Records
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