American Football’s Silver Jubilee

The house; the opening riff; no plans to make a second record; three land-grant college kids colliding into each other before drifting apart—none of it mattered then like all of it matters now. When Mike Kinsella, Steve Holmes and Steve Lamos holed up at Private Studios in Urbana, Illinois in May 1999, they came out with nine songs that few people loved immediately but now none of us can live without. Ask the band if, be it in the immediate aftermath of LP1’s release or during the 10 or so years that followed, it ever became obvious that the record was reaching the right people, and Kinsella will offer you a quick “no.” There’s no point in romancing American Football for the sake of retrospect; by the time the DIY emo scene was galvanized into something tangible and successful, Kinsella was already locked into his solo project Owen, and Holmes and Lamos were playing in the Geese together.

Holmes even goes as far as calling American Football a “retroactive one-hit wonder.” “The band had no following at the time and we were just documenting a thing,” he furthers. “And, you know, that was it. We had zero expectations that anyone beyond the 1,000 people in our scene would hear it.” Holmes is right about that, as LP1 may just be the greatest word-of-mouth record ever made. “And those words and those mouths didn’t seem obvious at all for a long time,” Lamos adds. “It was truly out of nowhere for us,” Kinsella replies. “It wasn’t in the lexicon. It didn’t exist in any way to me.”

Renowned now as LP1 may be, the men in American Football weren’t always the Midwest emo torchbearers that many would categorize them as now (though they certainly are top-rung in that regard). Upon their inception, the trio’s tendencies were much more mathy and post-rocky than anything else, and LP1 has just as much in common with Popol Vuh as it does Jawbreaker. Polyvinyl Record Co. founder Matt Lunsford even once said that LP1 and its demographic was “in a constant climb upwards,” though the record is rumored to have earned some good favor across college radio stations when it came out in September 1999. Its cultic rise from the ashes of obscurity, however, speaks to the holistic side of music discovery. LP1 exists two-fold: as Kinsella, Holmes and Lamos wrote and recorded it and as the rest of us have declared it to be in the 25 years since.

Though I am older than LP1, it feels like the kind of record that has existed forever. Like, yes, of course these three DIY punks who obsessed over Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians made a song as phenomenal as the eight-minute “Stay Home.” There is no configuration of life without that truth fastened into it. “That is still magic to me,” Lamos says. “Every time these guys start noodling, I still can’t count exactly what they’re doing, but it’s like, ‘Take the ride, spend 10 minutes doing the thing.’” He points to Ethel Cain’s new cover of “For Sure” and praises not the end-product, but the intent and the want to make a once-three-minute track so sprawling.

“I love that young kids want to take 10-minute vibe rides through an atmosphere these days,” Lamos continues. “It’s so exciting to me, because the rest of the world feels like these two-minute pop tracks. Nothing against two-minute pop tracks, but it seems like there’s a thirst again for ‘10 minutes, take your damn time, don’t go anywhere, put your headphones on and enjoy this thing.’ This generation ties right back to 25 years ago, because that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to just sit there and be for a little while.”

The fable of American Football is as folklorish as they come: three college friends start a band and make a record for a still-green label, only to break up before it’s even released and then, over a decade later, get back together and play sold out rooms across the United States to coincide with a special reissue of that very album that christened their then-ending. Kinsella’s old manager Chase put out feelers about a reunion tour without asking them, and it was, as Kinsella puts it, the first time they figured out that “anybody really cared” about LP1. “There wasn’t any moment of ‘Oh, let’s wait until this gets popular and then we can do it for real,’” Kinsella says. “It was just dead. The first couple of offers for the shows was like, ‘Oh, we can fill a room that big? That’s crazy.’ That blew our mind, and then we filled that same room three times over.”

Holmes corroborates that gradual uptick in impetus surrounding LP1, citing that the “modestly increasing” yearly royalty checks from Polyvinyl gave him a vague awareness of the band’s cresting tide of popularity. “Five years after the album came out, they did the first vinyl pressing, because it was originally CD only,” he says. “There were hints that somebody cared, but I always assumed that [it was because] Mike was playing and putting out solo records as Owen and he was in and out of Joan of Arc. I assumed it was Mike’s fans figuring out that, oh, he had a band before Owen. I didn’t realize [LP1] had taken on a life of its own.”

At the time LP1 came out, Polyvinyl was still verdant. They put out 7” splits before releasing a 20-song Midwestern DIY compilation called Direction. Soon after, they switched from being a fanzine press to a bonafide label, dropping records by Rainer Maria and Braid before signing American Football and releasing their debut EP in October 1998. Kinsella had met Matt Lunsford and Darcie Knight at a Cap’n Jazz show when he was still in high school. “They were already curating this cool indie scene,” he says. “So, when I went to U of I, I already knew they were doing cool stuff. We would see them hanging outside of every basement show on campus. They were truly just fans. In the same way, if we didn’t have any aspiration of ever being in a band that was successful, they had no goal of ‘Oh, we want to put out a label so we can pay our mortgage.’ They were like, ‘We want to put out records for our friends’ bands.’ It was a kindred, DIY spirit.”

“It was their way to be part of a scene and help support bands that they were fans of,” Holmes continues. “We all grew up loving Fugazi and the whole Dischord scene. I think Matt and Darcie invented their label in that 50-50 split model, and that started working with bands that we were friends of. It was a natural fit that, when we were ready to record, Matt was like, ‘Hey, we’re going to do a single series. You want to put out a single?’ And we’re like, ‘Sure!’”

Though Kinsella continues putting out records with Polyvinyl through Owen, the longevity of American Football has a lot to do with the support the label continues to throw behind LP1 and the band altogether. “How many labels from that era just stopped putting records out?” Kinsella wonders. “They literally kept it in press and kept it alive, kept it resuscitated.” “[Polyvinyl’s] curation of the label in general, and of this band and this record specifically—on any other label, I don’t think [LP1] would happen,” Holmes adds. “A lot of indie labels, when it goes out of print, that’s it. They sold out of the record, they’re done and they kept repressing it at-cost. Are 3,000 more people going to buy this record again? They don’t know.”

Polyvinyl never rested on being a Midwest emo label from the 1990s. Take a gander at their current roster—which includes everyone from IAN SWEET and Alvvays to Deerhoof and Jeff Rosenstock to Julia Jacklin and the Get Up Kids—and it becomes clear that, since 1995 or 1996, Matt and Darcie have always had their ears to the ground, always searching for not the next big hit, but something that delivers on the friends-first ethos the label was founded on in the first place. “They’re finding new bands and putting out cool new shit, which keeps their audience young and alive, kind of, in a way,” Kinsella says. “Then, that new audience can find their older catalog and find us. It’s multi-faceted how important and necessary it was for them to exist—for us to exist.”

“[LP1] shouldn’t have existed!” Lamos chimes in. “They knew that the band wasn’t a band anymore, and I had always assumed that, Mike, they knew you were doing solo work with them. I assumed that they must have figured, ‘Well, at least we’ll break even because we’ve got that. We’ve got the main artist, this will be a curiosity to people who know and love what Mike’s doing.’”

But Polyvinyl played it fair and put LP1 out, even though American Football was in the past tense by the time the five months between the recording and the release had passed. “I would get these checks—small—and I’d be like, ‘These people could have screwed me over eight ways from Sunday and I wouldn’t have known the difference,’ and they never did,” Lamos adds. “[They were] decent human beings with good old fashioned Midwest values. It’s nice to see good people do well in a world that, sometimes, seems like it’s full of people with not-so-great intentions. It’s an honor to be associated with people who are decent.”

American Football formed two years after Kinsella and his brother Tim founded Joan of Arc, a project culled from the ashes of their first band Cap’n Jazz (Lamos mentions that he was at the first Cap’n Jazz show in Danville, and that it was “one of the most magical musical experiences I’ve ever had”) while Mike was still in high school. Kinsella would write, record and tour with Joan of Arc on summer breaks, and he and Tim would try and deconstruct aggressive, visceral songs—or, as he likes to put it, “whatever the opposite of Cap’n Jazz was”—by adding restraints. Like American Football, a lot of those early Joan of Arc songs were patterns more than they were parts. (Holmes includes that he was bummed when Kinsella wrote “White Out” and the song entered the Joan of Arc canon rather than American Football’s.)

Though bands like Braid, the Promise Ring and Chamberlain helped Midwest emo gain some sense of prominence, the genre has settled into its slow-burn popularity that, broadly, is not mainstream but has found blips of success in the modern zeitgeist thanks to TikTok and meme culture. The opening riff from “Never Meant” continues to find new audiences through those vehicles; guitarists track slow, woozy, down-tuned instrumentals beneath viral clips; the well-known and beloved “American Football House” that appears on LP1’s cover was purchased by the band, Polyvinyl, Chris Strong, original photographer Atiba Jefferson and Chicago’s Open House Contemporary and is now an Airbnb. All of this over a band that, for 15 years, never became anything more than a good void to throw energy into on school nights and weekends. “This was what we did when we weren’t in class,” Holmes says. “We never thought of this as ‘Oh, we’re going to be a real band.’” The trio never let the project graduate out of a “side project,” and they argue that it’s still that.

Kinsella and Holmes went to high school and came up in the same suburban punk rock scene together. They were roommates during all four years of college, too. For a band that loved the crush and crunch of Rites of Spring just as much as they pored over the jangle-pop of the Smiths, the confluence of American Football rests against the connectivity of its two guitarists and their joint love of eclectic, soul-expanding music. “I think we kept discovering shit,” Kinsella says. “We’d come from loud hardcore bands,” Holmes remembers. “Our freshman year, we loved Yank Crime, the last Drive Like Jehu record. We were like, ‘Oh, they’ve mastered this sound. No band could do this loud, screamy math-rock better than them, so let’s do the opposite.’ Let’s try to do slow, quiet, pretty songs that are more influenced by Red House Painters and Nick Drake.”

What can be said about LP1 is that, without a doubt, Lamos’s drumming is the salve that glues the material together. “Lamos approached the drums in such a musical way,” Holmes says. “We would come in, often with guitar parts arranged, but the songs weren’t the songs until Steve had his say as well. The song ‘The Summer Ends’ is a perfect example of him helping arrange via drums. It starts with that tom part, and the horn melody makes the vibe of the song. And then, when the drums properly come in, that syncopated beat is pure Lamos. The next part, he turns the snare off and has a different feel. Then, it’s got the snare roll outro part with the snare back on. Lamos thought about arrangements in such an elaborate fashion. The reason the songs are cool is because he treated them that way.”

You can hear that anchoring rhythm on something like “Stay Home,” too, as Kinsella and Holmes’s guitars mirror each other for five minutes and Lamos makes subtle movements that allow the ground to shift. Lamos remembers the scene that produced Cap’n Jazz and cultivated a bubbly, horrific excitement as being like a religion. American Football, for him and for Kinsella and Holmes, was like the catharsis that sputters after the adrenaline settles. “I was shooting for the exact same vibe, but quiet,” he says. “‘How can I feel just as ecstatic but quiet?’ And not deliberately quiet. I couldn’t play that loud shit. I still can’t play these punk rock beats. My younger brother will come and bash on the drums and, to this day, I’m like, ‘How the fuck do you do that?’ I can’t do it.” But together, the trio are chasing something musical that is, in Lamos’s eyes, spiritual, too.

While they were both in the same tuning in the early days, American Football has since become synonymous with this idea that Holmes and Kinsella play in separate tunings. On LP1, there were instances of Holmes playing in standard while Kinsella worked out of open-E, allowing the high notes to travel through the low side and keep melodies interesting and shape-shifty. “You hear a note and you can’t reach it,” Kinsella says. “It’s about how I find the tunings. By the time you write the part, you realize that your tunings are all fucked. And then you get to practice and you realize that Holmes’s tunings are fucked, too.” “We’re like savants,” Holmes laughs. “You put a guitar on me and I don’t know what it is until you tell me what song. Then it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, no, I got it.’”

It was always a writing trick that the band calls “inventing,” or at least what that might have been like pre-internet, where you’re “put in the mind space of a novice” that exists outside of the pentatonic scale and rids the work of obvious, boring things that a standard tuning would lend itself to. Holmes admits that he and Kinsella often just “stumbled into” their tunings. “They ring in so pretty, though!” Lamos exclaims. “Those open tunings ring in such a different way that, even if you were voicing them as jazz chords, they just don’t do the same thing. The guitar—Nate calls it a “simple machine”—is this weird little toy that you can play the right way or you can mess around with and play the wrong way. The wrong way lends itself to shimmery things and the clean Telly sound. It all just fits together. To watch these two idiots magically figure out fingerings that go—I just don’t know how it’s even possible that you guys play these songs, because every one is so different. But, I don’t have to worry about that. I just sit back and do whatever.”

The story is that LP1 came together in just four days. Holmes thinks it was closer to seven days while Kinsella believes that a week sounds longer than it actually was. “It’s impossible to find out, nobody knows,” Holmes says. Lamos, however, agrees that it was four—claiming that, after rehearsing regularly and performing the instrumentals “live-ish,” because they all lived two blocks away from each other, the band tracked for two days over a weekend and then worked on vocals, “pushing sliders up” and getting into fights about bass parts on “I’ll See You When We’re Both Not so Emotional” before mixing the whole thing once Holmes returned from a birthday party the following Monday. “It wasn’t a fight!” Lamos proclaims. “I covered up my shitty drumming. We will correct that part on the record! No, I was like, ‘I hate the drum part so much, I’m putting this on there, like it or not,’ and we still do that once in a while. It sounded muddy and crazy and now it’s a part of this thing. Of course, I knew it was going to be perfect to have a double muddy fucking bass covering up my bad drumming. I can finally play that part on drums now, 25 years later. I like playing that song, but I hated it as a kid.”

LP1 is a chronicling of what it was like to be in college at Urbana-Champaign in the late 1990s, which is why it sounds like it does and why it’s such a cool, cool record (though “We’ve both been so unhappy, so let’s just see what happens” is forever). Holmes and Lamos didn’t know what Kinsella’s lyrics were until they started playing the songs live, because they didn’t have a PA system during rehearsal. “Mike, did you know what your lyrics were until we did the live show?” Lamos asks his bandmate. “The night before,” Kinsella chuckles. Every song on LP1 was written as an instrumental, and nearly 75% of the record’s lyrics were written in the studio just as they were about to hit record. Kinsella’s ramblings were random lines from his notebooks collaged together to make some sort of vague narrative. “It was thrust upon me,” he says of writing the lyrics. “Mike is the only guy who can play these parts and sing them at the same time,” Holmes argues. “It’s mind-boggling to this day. I can barely even play the parts, he’s gotta sing at the same time.” “Short syllables,” Kinsella admits.

But what does it feel like to make an album knowing that the band you’re in is going to break up? Did American Football, even for a second, slow down and let themselves be in-the-moment sentimental about those nine songs? “No, we didn’t have time,” Holmes laughs. “We were rushed, but we were very well-rehearsed. That records sounds, basically, how we sounded live, just with more fleshed out vocals. We’d go back and double the guitars to make it sound fuller, because there was no bass. We weren’t precious about it at all. I think we felt lucky that Matt and Darcie still wanted to put the record out knowing that we weren’t ever going to play any shows. They were giving us the opportunity to document the songs we made, and we felt lucky to get to do so.”

There are boombox demos and live recordings from a gig at the Blind Pig in Champaign, which Holmes calls a “warts and all” perspective of American Football still getting its bearings. “It shows you what this band was and what it sounded like,” he adds. “We were kids and it sounds like kids playing music and finding it in the moment. It sounds terrible, but that’s fine. I’m glad it exists.” Those boombox tracks were made by Lamos’s late father, who took the trio into his basement, set up two SM57 mics and had them play a couple of things into his two-track recorder. The outtakes are bare-bones gems for anyone itching to know and digest everything about American Football, a rarity not lost on the band, especially Lamos.

“Finding out that this stuff, somehow, reached other people that are not in our immediate friend group, it’s a really interesting thing to be a part of—to realize that you’ve been a part of something that connects with lots of different folks,” he says. “The older I get and the weirder I get, the more meaningful that is. What a thing to be able to experience, to be part of some larger thing that propels music. It’s a true pleasure that’s not to be taken lightly and not to be taken for granted. I think I’ve taken it for granted at certain times and places and I will try not to do it again.”

In the 15 years between LP1’s initial release and the band’s inaugural reunion, Kinsella, Holmes and Lamos rarely saw each other, keeping in “loose touch.” There were no secret rehearsals or side projects playing “Never Meant” on the sly. “Nobody was holding onto it,” Kinsella says. After playing in the Geese for a bit, Lamos left Chicago for Boulder to teach at a university. Holmes quit playing in bands for a decade and moved out to the ‘burbs to raise a family while Kinsella remained downtown. “[Mike and I] would run into each other not super often, but we’d maybe get lunch or dinner every few years,” Holmes says. “The only time I saw Mike was when a bunch of people got together to play Halo in an apartment by connecting their Xboxes together,” Lamos chimes in. “There were, like, 15 guys playing Halo. I think that was the first time I saw Mike in probably 10 years.” “That’s all I did,” Kinsella jokes.

But Holmes recalls his tenure with the Geese being the first instance of him witnessing an opening band full of “American Football nerds” who played every song in F-A-C-G-C-E. “They were way better at it than us,” he laughs. “I was like, ‘Oh, people discovered the American Football trick and stole it and do it better than we did it, but that was an anomaly. I never saw any other band like that for years.”

When it came time to reassemble for the reunion shows, the trio had to re-learn all nine songs for the first time in almost two decades. “I swear, to this day, I think Mike learned all the songs in different tunings than they were originally,” Holmes says. “Everybody sounds the way they sound,” Kinsella replies. “If I’m trying to remember a thing I did years before, I’m like, ‘Oh, what would I do?’ And it’s always 1,000% exactly what I would do. To a fault, it’s just the way I hear music. But it’s how we all are. Lamos sets up his drums the same way he did, and I’m like, ‘Oh, this makes sense. This is where we are!’ And Holmes does the same noodles.”

Kinsella’s cousin Nate joined the band as a bassist and things went without many hitches. “That first practice, it was shockingly like, ‘Oh, that sounds like American Football,’” Holmes adds. “We didn’t know if we could do it until we got in the room. But part of the magic of the alchemy of the four of us and [LP1] is that we all do have our own thing, and the sume is greater than its parts. Lamos, melodically, is in a different world than Mike and I. The notes he thinks to hit on horn—Mike and I would never play that note. Adding that blue note that’s in a minor key to an open major seventh chord doesn’t make sense in my brain, but it makes sense to Lamos and that’s why ‘The Summer Ends’ is a cool song, because he played the note that Mike and I wouldn’t have thought to play.”

Retrospect has paid off well for American Football, too. It’s not a disintegrated band patching itself up for the sake of saving face in front of a new generation of listeners; the trio had to step into a past life, decipher the “us-at-that-age logic” they used in each section of LP1 and make it contemporary. “It felt like karaoke at first, or like I have to somehow not screw up,” Lamos admits. “That was my whole M.O. performing: ‘Don’t mess this up.’ And now, 10 years in, it feels like music. I’m like, ‘This is cool. There’s a reason we put these songs together this way. It feels like music to perform them, finally.” “We’re playing [LP1] now as adults, so I’m more fond of most of the songs now than I ever was,” Kinsella adds. “Right now the band is probably more popular than it’s ever been, which is bizarre,” Holmes concludes. “People keep finding it, and we’re all just lucky that we still get to do this and that people are there and excited to see it.”

In October 2024, Polyvinyl will continue to expand the discovery of American Football by releasing an album featuring 10 artists reinventing those nine LP1 songs, including Blondshell, M.A.G.S., Manchester Orchestra and Yvette Young (or, as Kinsella infers, 10 artists really “hearing” the music). The idea to do a covers album started when the band was touring for LP3 in 2019. “It was this off-the-cuff idea that came up in the van or in an airport somewhere,” Holmes says. “It’s amazing that, five years later, this dumb idea we had on tour is a real thing.”

Lamos wasn’t involved in the band at the time, and jokes that the decision was made then because of his absence. “I’m never a fan of this kind of project,” he admits. “I would’ve been like, ‘It’s lame to do a cover thing of your own record.’ Now, I’m so grateful for it. I think it was deliberate that I was out of the band at that point, so I didn’t get to raise such stupid objections—because it really is a neat thing to watch other folks, who we love and respect, do something really cool. Girl Ultra took my least favorite track off LP1 (‘But the Regrets Are Killing Me’) and made it cool as shit. It sounds like the Police. It’s just fantastic.”

Holmes found a new appreciation for LP1 after hearing the songs re-interpreted by those other artists, especially Iron & Wine’s cover of “Never Meant.” “The first time I listened to it, I was like, ‘Oh, wow, that is actually a good song,’” he says. “You can see it in a different way when somebody else does it and not feel as self-conscious about what you were trying to do as a kid.” Tortoise drummer John McEntire performs a rendition of “The One with the Wurlitzer, and it became a full-circle moment for American Football. “I teared up when I heard John’s cover, because that was a guy who is 10 or 15 years older than us and was in the coolest band in the world when we were 20 years old,” Holmes adds. “The fact that he’s now playing one of our songs all these years later… I’m super impressed and flattered that he would even bother to do it.”

What the covers record does is make a case for why LP1 remains such a transportive and transcendental record 25 years on. Certainly American Football didn’t care much about “Never Meant” being one of the greatest side one/track ones ever, but that doesn’t mean the work isn’t done just because they caught a glimpse of the mountaintop without leaving the base. “There’s a certain feeling I’m chasing, a mantra or a repetition,” Lamos says. “I think of ‘Every Wave to Ever Rise’ off that third record, that’s one of my favorite drum parts to play, and it doesn’t do that much. It changes, but it sits and it’s loud. I’m trying to channel [John] Bonham, or something. But, really, I’m just trying to get out of my own head and be like, ‘I want to be free of everything for three, six or seven minutes.”

“I don’t know if that’s so much standing on the shoulders of ‘Never Meant,’ but God damn it, I need these times and places of ‘Let me exist,’” Lamos continues. “I can’t get that anywhere else except with these idiots. We’ve all tried lots of different ways and lots of other places. This is where it happens for me and, in that sense, I’m grateful whenever anyone else wants to hear it. I just want to keep chasing that infinite feeling of possibility. Whatever it takes to get there, that’s why this is more valuable to me now even than before.”

Many argue that LP1 is American Football’s third-best album, and maybe that is true. But, there is something about hearing those three Chicago kids trying to beat against the current of the scene that swallowed them all up in the first place that deserves to be celebrated. LP1 is like a fitting room in a department store: techniques and lightbulb moments come and go; some fit, some don’t. But all of it makes sense. “On LP1, there are a lot of things that are cringe for me, but it’s also so honest and earnestly youthful,” Kinsella says. “It sounds like people discovering this new idea they have, or realizing some ideas they have. It’s trying something, which is attractive.”

LP1 was a maelstrom of experimental, low-stakes miscellany—lyrics that were stubbornly philosophical and instrumentals that still, to this day, feel alien yet beautifully eternal. As Kinsella sings on “But the Regrets Are Killing Me”: “A long goodbye with mixed emotions, just fragments of another life.” No two lines can sum LP1 up better than that, because when Lamos throws ergonomics to the wind while pounding his walnut snare, you feel it rushing up your spine. As Holmes switches through A, B and C like a car changing lanes, chords become bodies holding each other in warmth. When Kinsella utters one of his simple syllables, it sounds like it’s coming from the next room over—so you drop whatever you’re doing and go see what all the fuss is about.

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Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.