American Football has, somehow, become more emo on its fourth album, despite journeying farther from the genre.

LP4, as its known, pimps the confessionalism of emo vocab, one of the aspects of the Midwestern scene that American Football shied away from – or they, at least, shied away the maximalism of such lyrics. The stark emotions of suburban alienation were once quaternary to polyrhythms, time signature-tolling, and classic Midwest riffing.

In its confessionalism – which is poetically gussied despite themes that include guilt, disgrace and suicidal thoughts, all stemming from Mike Kinsella’s alcoholism, infidelity and subsequent divorce – the album is jaw-dropping. It is strangely beautiful despite its self-infliction.

I only wish such a self-portrait could have lived concurrently with an instrumental setup akin to the band’s 1999 debut. Some lyrics, their brutality, do feel like overcompensations – the “buried alive in your lies. Are you the devil I know or the devil I don’t?” from Desdemona – though at least they are perfectly brutal, albeit distractions from plainer, unbracing indie rock.

Any overcompensation on the musical front is best evidenced by No Feeling’s lack of care. The mix is plagued by a noisy vibraphone that intrudes, like a convenient act of self-sabotage. An artistic proclamation of beauty within or just bad production?

But you can put that to one side and treasure Mike’s ‘very emo’ sincerity, juggled by warty lyrics and the funereal he sings them with. He has grown, in his late forties, into a remarkably engaging singer, sneaking his voice into Man Overboard as if dodging the tumbling rocks envisioned by its toms, underlining his self-hatred.

He whimpers on Bad Moons (“surprise, I’m just two little boys in a trench coat with plastic knives”); the album’s complete package of conveyance, featuring a bassline melodic with purpose, and violins that twinkle and screech. Mike is gutsy, embarrassed, and demands a burning crescendo.

He softly approaches compromise, communication and accountability on Patron Saint of Pale – “I was born cursed with two left feet and I can’t keep dancing to the beats of all your dumb doldrums”.

For once, an American Football album was made out of necessity, not to supply technical rock music to those who want it, but to give an update on wherewithal, for the sake of mutuality. That said, No Soul to Save has an impressively uncertain rhythm to it.

It helps that LP4 is not an album that begs for forgiveness; it takes no qualms with “fuck this guy” being the audience response; Mike doesn’t puppy-dog his singing.

It is strange that we’ve reached a point in history in which there are four American Football albums; we went seventeen years with only one. Stranger still is the persistent unity to the band that remains beautiful. American Football ruptured following the release of its third album in 2019; excessive drinking and in-band bullying tore the group apart.

But Mike Kinsella, Steve Holmes, Steve Lamos, and more recently, Nate Kinsella, refuse to do the whole American Football thing without one another. The band’s vitality is now allotted by the weight of the guilt its current state developed from. That and the repurposed, refurbished unity of this staple of rock music that is, somehow, still together.

Best tracks – Man Overboard – Bad Moons.

Rating – 7 out of 10