American Football: American Football [POLYVINYL]

Why you'll love it

American Football's only album as a trio barely made a ripple in 1999, then quietly became one of the most important emo records ever made. When Polyvinyl announced the deluxe reissue in 2014, the demand crashed the label's website.

This edition

• Polyvinyl pressing

About the album

Mike Kinsella, Steve Holmes and Steve Lamos were college students in Urbana, Illinois when they recorded American Football in May 1999, and they broke up not long after it came out, because they no longer lived in the same city. That might have been the end of it, except people kept finding this record: the twinkling, interlocking guitars, the jazzy odd-time drumming, Lamos' trumpet and Kinsella's quietly devastating lyrics about growing up and letting go.

"Never Meant" is the one everyone knows, with an opening guitar line that launched a thousand bands, "Honestly?" and "The Summer Ends" are bittersweet and beautiful, and "Stay Home" stretches out into nearly nine minutes of slow-motion melancholy. The house on the cover is a pilgrimage site now. Few debuts have aged this well.

Also at Kops: more American Football on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Polyvinyl, first out in 1999.