When Mike Kinsella, Steve Holmes, and Steve Lamos got together in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois to record American Football’s eponymous debut in the spring of 1999, their expectations were low, almost comically so. Certainly, the band didn’t expect to stick around for long. They were essentially unknown outside of a few underground rock clubs in the Midwest, and by the time they entered the studio for a six-day session with a $2,000 budget, they’d already decided to break up. Per the band’s own estimates, American Football had only played somewhere between 15 and 30 sparsely attended shows in their three years of existence. “No one cared about this band,†Holmes told The Guardian decades later. “We were an afterthought to an afterthought.â€
2 x Vinyl LP, T-Shirt/Shirt,
From there, the members headed in their own directions: Kinsella launched a solo project, Holmes worked his way up the corporate ladder, Lamos became a college professor, and everyone settled down and had children. American Football was something they looked back on with fondness for their youth, like summer camp or little league. But over the years, the three would slowly discover through word-of-mouth and unexpectedly large royalty payments that American Football had quietly become a seminal album in a genre they had unknowingly helped to define. They were among the godfathers of emo and they didn’t even realize it.
But here’s the paradoxical kicker: Despite being given top billing among emo essentials, the original American Football album is the idiosyncratic result of three college students with a shared taste for a variety of obscure, unorthodox music who collided to create something unique, timeless, and genre-defining, with a legacy that lasts a quarter of a century later. American Football set out to break the mold of “emo†before that term had even taken hold—and here’s how they got there.
Dischord and Dissonance
Hoover
Vinyl LP
When the members of American Football were in their teens in the early ‘90s, Dischord Records was one of the nerve centers of punk rock and the DIY underground. As the label in Washington, D.C., evolved from the Minor Threat-style hardcore of the ‘80s into the Fugazi-style post-hardcore of the ‘90s, these kids in Chicagoland were buying up every Dischord tape they could find, including from bands like Nation of Ulysses, Shudder to Think, Jawbox, Rites of Spring, Embrace, and Lungfish. A more obscure, but no less influential, band from the Dischord catalog, Hoover were instrumental in forging the D.C. sound, tempering the dissonance, angst, and ferocity of hardcore with complexity, experimentation, and emotion.
Slint
Down in Louisville, Kentucky, Slint were bursting even further outside of the confines of traditional rock. The band’s syncopated riffs, dissonant chords, drastic dynamics, and frequent changes in tempo and time signature made them what some consider to be the inventors of math rock, a style that greatly contributed to American Football’s off-kilter rhythms and interwoven melodies. And thanks to their work with engineer Steve Albini in Chicago, Slint had a strong link to one of the most thriving DIY rock scenes in the country.
Chicago’s Indie Rock Underground
Cap’n Jazz
Started by Tim and Mike Kinsella in the suburbs of Chicago in 1989, when the brothers were 15 and 12 years old, respectively, Cap’n Jazz lasted just long enough to become cult favorites. Compared to other now-classic mid-‘90s emo artists, Cap’n Jazz were probably the weirdest. The band’s first and only album—later repackaged in the compilation album Analphabetapolothology—is a scattershot collage of emotive punk rock with lovesick lyricism, drug-induced surrealism, and a smattering of unpredictable, overlapping ideas from a group of musicians whose foundation seems to be shifting underneath them. While drumming for Cap’n Jazz, Mike Kinsella learned guitar techniques from his bandmates Davey von Bohlen, who went on to lead The Promise Ring, and Victor Villarreal, whose use of open chords and complex fingerpicking would become a hallmark of American Football, which Kinsella would form after Cap’n Jazz’s breakup in 1995.
Tortoise
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP
In the early ‘90s, Chicago’s thriving DIY scene developed a reputation for embracing experimental oddities like Tortoise, whose members emerged from the city’s indie rock and punk scenes to form a new type of band that was a combination of experimental rock, electronic music, and avant-garde jazz. Their eclectic, loosely structured instrumental compositions made them post-rock pioneers, an evolution that would capture the ears of American Football’s members. Throughout the decade to come, post-rock would grow in global popularity with the emergence of acts like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai, and Sigur Rós. Kinsella, Holmes, and Lamos got an early look at the developing subgenre as Tortoise rewrote the rock format right at home.
The Sea and Cake
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Beyond the jazzy post-rock of Tortoise, American Football were deeply inspired by acts like Red House Painters, Codeine, and Slowdive, all known for slower, subdued indie rock songs dripping in melancholy. You can look to The Sea and Cake, another group of veteran Chicago scenesters, for a helpful link between those two sources of inspiration. Their songs were soft, sad, and seemingly minimalistic, but the somber textures were colored by elements of jazz, bossa nova, ambient, and electronic music. The Sea and Cake were plaintive and understated yet sneakily complex—a description that could also be applied to American Football, who have repeatedly cited the former band as an influence.
Boundary-Pushing Explorations
Steve Reich
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP
One of the most impactful artists on American Football’s creative process was Steve Reich, the American orchestral composer who led the development of minimalist music throughout the latter half of the 20th century. “Cap’n Jazz had that sort of Dischord, Fugazi influence,†Kinsella later told Rolling Stone. “But in our minds, [American Football] was a 180 from that. We were consciously trying not to rock out. Instead, we tried to write like Steve Reich.†The trio was obsessed with Reich’s landmark work Music for 18 Musicians, which features lengthy cycles of music noted for infrequent chord changes and pulsing, phase-shifted patterns. Taking cues from Reich, American Football played around with overlapping, interlocking guitar parts—best demonstrated in the looping, cascading guitar riffs of the eight-minute “Stay Home.â€
Smog
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP
Smog is the recording project of singer-songwriter Bill Callahan, who grew up in the Maryland hardcore scene and became absorbed in the Chicago scene when he signed to the local label Drag City and collaborated with tastemakers Steve Albini and Jim O’Rourke. Throughout the ‘90s, Smog recorded nine albums that gradually evolved from dissonant, loosely structured lo-fi experiments into sparse, brooding, and lyrically poignant collections of simple guitar-and-vocal songs. The story goes that Steve Holmes traded tapes with a classmate with whom he had bonded over their love of Nick Drake, giving him Smog and getting Elliott Smith in return. Those artists would inform American Football’s plaintive, understated sound, and it’s the presence of those influences that gave the band a certain youthful angst that distinguishes them from other indie rock acts of the time.
Miles Davis
Vinyl LP
While elements of jazz had sneakily made their way into the musical DNA of several of American Football’s rock influences, jazz itself was also formative to the trio’s approach. The jazz tradition is founded upon an ethos of openness, collaboration, and improvisation, and American Football’s process was likewise informed by those tenets—there are instrumental stretches of songs like “Honestly?†and “You Know I Should Be Leaving Soon†that don’t feel far removed from a jazz trio throwing away their charts and stretching out. Drummer Steve Lamos was especially drawn to Miles Davis, who was never interested in doing the same thing over again; he was constantly reinventing himself, exploring new modes, and altering the course of music several times over. On a smaller scale, American Football embraced that spirit: They broke away from punk rock and did something different, drawing from a mix of cutting-edge artists. When they brought it together and made their first album as American Football in 1999, they changed the way people would talk about emo for the next 25 years and counting.
“We’d come from loud hardcore bands,†Holmes remembers. “Our freshman year, we loved Yank Crime, the last Drive Like Jehu record. We were like, ‘Oh, they’ve mastered this sound. No band could do this loud, screamy math-rock better than them, so let’s do the opposite.’ Let’s try to do slow, quiet, pretty songs that are more influenced by Red House Painters and Nick Drake.â€
