American Football - American Football (LP4)

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.