American Football

Since 1997 · United States

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American Football (1999)

American Football trades the hardcore urgency of the band members' earlier projects for something quieter and more intricate: twinkling, interlocking guitar lines, jazz-inflected chords, and trumpet drifting through the mix. "Never Meant" builds a whole song out of a single conversational guitar figure, Mike Kinsella's plainspoken vocal sitting almost shyly in the mix rather than out front. The band broke up shortly after its release, with little sense the record would be remembered. Rediscovered over the following decade, it became one of the most quietly influential albums in the midwest-emo and "twinkly" post-rock scenes that followed.

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American Football

American Football · 1999

American Football formed in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois in 1997, a college-town project among Mike Kinsella, Steve Holmes, and Steve Lamos that consciously moved away from the hardcore-adjacent emo Kinsella had played in Cap'n Jazz toward something quieter and more intricate — twinkling, interlocking guitar lines built on jazz-influenced chord voicings and trumpet flourishes courtesy of Lamos. The band released one album and a handful of singles before quietly disbanding in 2000, its members moving on to other projects with little expectation the record would be remembered.

That self-titled 1999 album, its cover photograph of a house near the University of Illinois campus becoming nearly as iconic as the music itself, was gradually rediscovered through the 2000s and 2010s by a new generation of listeners connecting it to the emerging "emo revival" and the broader midwest-emo sound it had unknowingly helped originate. The band reunited in 2014, decades after their initial breakup, to play the record live for audiences many times larger than any they'd performed for the first time around, and have continued releasing new music since.