Into The Music
American Football have confirmed their fourth studio album, officially titled LP4 but carrying the album number like its predecessors. It comes out May 1 on Polyvinyl, and the lead single is out now: “Bad Moons” is an eight-minute track that started as two separate songs and got fused together, which tells you everything you need to know about where Mike Kinsella’s head is at.
“I decided to begin the song as a child,” Kinsella said in a statement accompanying the release. “Or, rather, two. Stacked up in a single trench coat; secretly, reluctantly living the life of a grown man, accruing all of his missteps and guilt along the way. By the end, these missteps are almost spilling out of the boys. A cathartic confession, hopefully at least somewhat relatable to anyone listening who has ever lived a life.”
That framing is pure American Football: the wry self-examination, the metaphor that is both absurd and somehow exactly right, the sense that guilt is not some heavy dramatic burden but a kind of embarrassing accumulation of ordinary mess. The band have been doing this since they put out their self-titled debut in 1999 and then immediately broke up. That first record became one of the most referenced albums in indie rock history while the band was not together. When they reconvened in 2014, they did so to a degree of reverence that most bands never receive during their active career, let alone after a decade-plus hiatus.
LP2 in 2016 and LP3 in 2019 each took the band somewhere new without losing the careful, interlocking guitar work and the late-night, everything-is-too-much emotional register that made the first record so enduring. The spring 2026 Pitchfork most-anticipated albums list put LP4 near the top, noting that the band has now been reunited four times longer than their original run, and that their audience has never been larger.
For each ticket sold on their upcoming North American and European tour, the band will donate a dollar, pound, or euro to Safe Passage International and the Illinois Coalition for Immigration and Refugee Rights. The tour kicks off later in May.
“Bad Moons” is exactly what it needs to be. Eight minutes of guitar interplay that sounds like a conversation between two people who have been talking their whole lives and are finally getting somewhere. If LP4 follows through on that promise, May 1 is going to be a very good day for indie rock.
Not my usual territory but LP4 as a title is kind of perfect , no pretense, just the thing itself. Respect.
People act like emo and post-rock are some elite art form that needs protecting from excitement, but American Football just quietly making LP4 with zero drama is exactly how you do it. No genre gatekeeping, no think pieces about whether they’ve sold out , just a band making a fourth record on Polyvinyl. May 1 can’t come fast enough.
Felicity you’re so right about the zero drama thing, and honestly it’s the same argument I’d make for Taylor going indie on her re-records , the gesture matters as much as the content sometimes. American Football titling it LP4 is that same energy. No manifesto, no rebranding, just: here is the next thing. There’s a kind of artistic integrity in refusing to make the release itself into a performance. I think the artists who’ve been doing it longest tend to trust the music to speak without the packaging shouting.
Felicity, this is exactly what separates the bands that endure from the ones that burn out chasing narrative. It reminds me a lot of how Malajube or early Ought operated in Quebec , no hype cycle, no announcement ecosystem, just album après album with a kind of quiet confidence. LP4 as a title is almost aggressively undramatic and I mean that as a compliment. The post-rock world in Canada has always had this aesthetic , think of what Godspeed do with their untitled-everything approach. American Football aren’t doing anything new but they’re doing it beautifully.
Okay I am NOT usually in the emo/post-rock world but the way people talk about American Football’s LP2 and LP3 , that kind of quiet, building emotional intensity , honestly reminds me of how a good zouk song builds! Different textures completely, but that same feeling of being pulled somewhere slowly. May 1 is circled!!
Chloe, that comparison to the way groove-based music builds emotional intensity is more astute than you might realize. What LP3 does especially well , and I’m curious whether LP4 continues this , is use metric displacement in the guitar figures to create a kind of suspended yearning. It’s the jazz concept of playing “outside” applied to emo: the rhythm seems to resist resolution until suddenly it lands and the feeling is enormous. Not my usual bag, but I have a student who made me really listen, and I get it now.
What interests me about LP4 arriving on Polyvinyl is what that label relationship signals , Polyvinyl has historically allowed for long silences between records without the commercial pressure that would force a pivot. The numerically titled albums create a kind of catalog logic that’s more common in classical music or jazz, where opus numbers carry weight. American Football seem to be constructing something that functions as a complete body of work rather than a series of standalone releases. Whether LP4 continues the textural shift from LP3 toward more rhythmic complexity will be the real story.
Okay I will be honest, American Football does NOT make me want to move , this is not salsa tempo, this is not even close , but there is something about the way people describe LP2 and LP3 that makes me want to understand what that stillness feels like. May 1st! I’m putting it on.
The intervallic language on that first single is very LP3 in its harmonic movement , suspended chords resolving down by half-step, the guitar counterpoint sitting just off the beat in that way that creates forward motion without actual momentum. Mike Kinsella has always operated closer to chamber music than post-rock, and I mean that as real praise. Very curious whether LP4 maintains that restraint or pushes somewhere new.
Here’s the thing about American Football that I keep coming back to: they sound like something overheard through a wall. Not performed, not presented , just happening somewhere nearby. My old man was a country man through and through, and there’s a kind of emotional restraint in that tradition too, where the feeling is bigger than the words and the music barely raises its voice. American Football works the same way. LP4 on Polyvinyl with no fanfare, no campaign , that’s exactly the energy. Some bands would’ve milked this reunion arc for years. These lads just quietly made another record.
Cassandra, your read on the harmonic movement is precise, but what interests me equally is the rhythmic architecture , that just-off-the-beat guitar counterpoint you mention is functionally a motorik displacement, not in tempo but in emphasis. Can did this vertically across instruments; American Football does it melodically. It’s a different vocabulary arriving at something like the same sensation of time becoming elastic. LP3 had it consistently; the question for LP4 is whether they can sustain it across a full album without it resolving too soon.
I’ll give American Football this , they take their time, and patient construction is rare enough now that it actually means something. I still think there’s an emotional temperature that jazz reaches that rock bands, even the careful ones, rarely get to , the kind of earned melancholy you hear on Coltrane’s Ballads or early Bill Evans. But LP3 made me sit down and actually listen, which is more than most records do these days. I’ll be watching for LP4.
Ten comments deep on an American Football announcement and nobody’s going to push back even a little? Look, I respect the craft , those guitar harmonics are genuinely beautiful and the songwriting is patient in a way that’s rare. But the degree of reverence this band gets online sometimes feels out of proportion to how accessible the music actually is. My tíos have been making emotionally devastating guitar music in East LA since before these guys were born and they’re not getting think-pieces about it. Just something to sit with.