{"id":10659,"date":"2026-05-01T13:44:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T13:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/american-football-lp4-review\/"},"modified":"2026-05-01T13:44:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T13:44:00","slug":"american-football-lp4-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/american-football-lp4-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Older, Sadder, Better: American Football Leans In On \u2018LP4\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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(photo: Alexa Viscius)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On its improbable third album since reuniting in 2014<\/a> after a 14-year hiatus, American Football isn\u2019t interested in reclaiming youth so much as interrogating what came after it. The Sonny DiPerri-co-produced LP4<\/em> (Polyvinyl) doesn\u2019t just revisit the band\u2019s long-established emotional palette \u2013 it complicates it, stretching those heart-piercing guitar lattices and murmured confessions into heavier, stranger and, at times, genuinely disorienting realms. After all, emo boys don\u2019t merely cry \u2013 they write songs that make everyone else cry too. Here, that impulse often feels like equal parts catharsis and confrontation.<\/p>\n

Opener \u201cMan Overboard\u201d quickly signals the shift. Its knotty, almost dizzying drum pattern and swelling walls of sound feel alien in this context, culminating in Mike Kinsella\u2019s blunt admission, \u201cIt\u2019s hopeless.\u201d By the time \u201cNo Feeling\u201d settles into something closer to the band\u2019s classic shimmer (heartbeat bass, interlocking six-strings, guest harmony vocals from Turnstile\u2019s Brendan Yates), he\u2019s emotionally checked out, tracing the numb aftermath of endings that don\u2019t come with villains.<\/p>\n

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