American Football

The band was formed by Mike Kinsella and Steve Lamos, who both played in The One Up Downstairs along with Dave and Allen Johnson, who would later form the band Very Secretary. Soon after The One Up Downstairs came together, they wrote three songs together in order to release them as a 7” vinyl on Polyvinyl Records. However, the band broke up before the record was pressed, and Kinsella and Lamos were determined to keep performing together. Together with Steve Holmes, a guitarist and mutual friend of theirs, they started putting together a new band, a band which you can tell was formed before the age of Google because they named it American Football.

The new power trio spent one year writing, recording and rehearsing before releasing their self-titled debut E.P, again through Polyvinyl Records. Like the vast majority of American underground punk releases, it was massively acclaimed by the very, very few people who heard it, but all the same, it was enough to justify the recording and release of their debut studio album, which came along in 1999. By this point, the acclaim for the album was so strong that word started to spread about the band into the overground punk scene, and the band started to attract the beginnings of a cult following.

However, the year after they released their first album, the band announced that they would become a studio only project, and soon after that the band decided to call it quits altogether, a mere three years after they’d formed. Over the 2000’s, the “American Football” album became a touchstone for the rising emo movement that took over the world of rock for a couple of years, and word about them began to spread faster than it had ever done when they were together thanks to the internet.

In 2014, nearly a decade and a half after they had split up originally, it was announced that the band were reuniting, and would tour the world over the next couple of years. Their first live shows in Illinois and New York were acclaimed as everything that fans of the band had hoped for during the time they’d been away. Unfortunately, there’s no sign yet of any new material, but there’s also no sign that they’ll be going off the road any time soon. With their technical emo rock more in favour than ever before, and the band members in the prime of their years, American Football come highly recommended.