There is a particular kind of courage in returning to something you already did perfectly. American Football's self-titled debut — the one with the house, the one with the trumpet, the one that half the internet has tattooed somewhere on their body — is the kind of record that calcifies into myth while the people who made it keep aging. So when the Champaign, Illinois quartet dropped LP4 on May 1st via Polyvinyl Records, the question wasn't whether it would sound like the old record. It was whether these four men — Mike Kinsella, Nate Kinsella, Steve Holmes, and Steve Lamos — had anything left to say that was worth the weight of the comparison.
They do. Considerably more than that, actually.
The fact that LP4 exists at all is its own story. After touring LP3 in 2019, the band planned a break that the pandemic stretched into something longer and harder. Lamos stepped away from the band entirely in 2021 for personal reasons, and attempts to write remotely faltered. When Lamos returned in 2023 and the band reconvened, something shifted — and the record they made together is the most emotionally direct thing they've ever committed to tape.
LP4 was recorded during a ten-day retreat in Stinson Beach and produced by Sonny DiPerri and American Football. DiPerri has a gift for making space feel pressurized without collapsing it, and that quality suits American Football's architecture — the interlocking guitars, the time signatures that breathe rather than march, the way silence functions as a fifth instrument. The record opens with "Man Overboard," a piece that arrives with the patience of a band that has nothing left to prove and everything left to feel. It sets the tone cleanly: this is not a nostalgia exercise. Polyvinyl described LP4 as "unflinchingly heavy," and the label isn't wrong — suicide, shame, divorce, addiction, self-loathing, and rebirth all surface across the ten tracks, sometimes in the same song. Mike Kinsella has always written with a kind of plain-spoken devastation, and here he's pushed that instinct further. "The goal has always been to say something giant and heavy in a very plain way," he said before the album's release. "On this record, I keep things a little more vague — and I think that makes it more honest."
The guest appearances are the other story worth telling. "No Feeling" — the second single, released April 8th — features Brendan Yates of Turnstile, and the pairing is stranger and more right than it has any business being. Nate Kinsella described Yates's voice as having "a shimmery, sort of silver quality" when he sings high and nails those long pitches, and the track earns that description: Yates doesn't overwhelm the song's architecture, he inhabits it. Caithlin De Marrais of Rainer Maria appears on "Blood on My Blood," a pairing of emo lineages that feels like a handshake across a shared history rather than a stunt. And Wisp — the rising shoegaze artist also known as Natalie Lu — brings something genuinely unexpected to "Wake Her Up," her vocals adding a gauzy, almost spectral texture to one of the album's most emotionally open moments. These aren't cameos; they're load-bearing.
The album arrived on the back of American Football's sold-out 25th anniversary tour and a companion covers album — a track-by-track reimagining of LP1 by artists including Iron and Wine, Ethel Cain, Blondshell, and Manchester Orchestra — a period that read, at the time, like a graceful victory lap. LP4 reframes all of it. The anniversary tour wasn't a farewell; it was a warm-up. The covers record wasn't a placeholder; it was a band watching what its music meant to other people before going somewhere darker with it. Mike Kinsella put it simply: "This album is a leap of faith, musically, but I'm proud of us for being ambitious enough to try something different." The first single, "Bad Moons," dropped February 25th and clocked in at around eight minutes — a statement of intent that the band wasn't here to play the hits.
What LP4 ultimately argues is that the most interesting thing about American Football in 2026 isn't that they still exist — it's that they've kept growing into something harder to categorize. The math-rock intricacy is still there, the tremolo-picked guitar lines still glitter in the right places, but the emotional register has shifted. This isn't the record of young men processing the end of something. It's the record of people in the middle of their lives, still mid-process, still uncertain, still willing to let the tape roll while Nate Kinsella runs into a microphone and apologizes — and then deciding, collectively, to leave it in. That detail, small as it is, says more about where this band is than any press release could.
