American Football - LP4 (Red Vinyl)

The quietest voices don’t just endure — sometimes they deepen.

For a band once defined by understatement, American Football has become something increasingly rare: one whose stature has grown less by nostalgia than through patience, self-interrogation and the long view. Since reuniting in 2014 after a decade-plus dormancy, American Football hasn’t simply returned to its past. It has moved forward in parallel with its audience, writing music that reflects the disorientation, compromise, grief and hard-won perspective of middle age.

Its fourth self-titled album (LP4) is the clearest and most satisfying expression of that evolution yet. It’s simultaneously the band’s darkest and most playful, its most complex and — paradoxically — its most generous. Throughout, LP4 stares matter-of-factly at despair while refusing the comforts of melodrama or easy resolution.

Indeed, on “Patron Saint of Pale,” frontman Mike Kinsella proposes playing Rock Paper Scissors with his soon-to-be ex-wife as a way to avoid signing their divorce papers. And on the gripping, eight-minute “Bad Moons,” he jokes about actually being two little kids disguised in a trench coat rather than a flesh-and-blood 40-something dad of two teens, before the reality of the situation can no longer be avoided: “I lost my mind in the dark / I told all my lies in the dark / I poured my drinks in the dark / I explored new kinks in the dark,” he sings, his voice seemingly cracking at times under the cold, hard truths.

“That's the one where I was like, ‘Oh, fuck. My mom's gonna listen to this.’ But I’m proud of it,” Kinsella says. “I think only a grown person would think those things or say those things, and I'm a grown man.” “Those are not funny lyrics,” drummer Steve Lamos adds, “but there’s a weird ‘fuck it’ to the whole thing that I love.”

That restless desire to grow and evolve has guided American Football since its return. The band’s 1999 self-titled debut became a touchstone almost accidentally — a record whose elliptical lyrics and interlocking guitar lines sneakily rewired Midwestern emo and post-rock alike. During the 2014 tour, the quartet was surprised to find itself playing larger rooms than it ever had the first time around. “It felt like stumbling into being a mid-level band without having earned it,” guitarist Steve Holmes says of those first shows back.