American Football (LP1 - 25th Anniversary Edition)

This is the definitive version of America Football's classic debut album

SONGS
1. Never Meant
2. The Summer Ends
3. Honestly?
4. For Sure
5. You Know I Should Be Leaving Soon
6. But the Regrets Are Killing Me
7. I'll See You When We're Both Not So Emotional
8. Stay Home
9. The One With The Wurlitzer

VINYL DETAILS
+ 2 x LP Silver Vinyl
+ 45 RPM
+ Remastered (2024)
+ Embossed Gatefold Jacket on Metallic Silver stock
+ Printed Cardstock Innersleeves
+ Expanded packaging includes a large-format 24-page booklet featuring new liner notes and handwritten lyrics by Mike Kinsella

American Football cut its first – and, for a long time, only – LP in four days, as the spring of 1999 slid into summer. Steve Holmes, Steve Lamos, and Mike Kinsella were college kids who knew that as soon as their album of spacious and tenderly sad songs was done they likely would be, too. Aside from a few shows, they would break up at the end of the school year and perhaps go on to other bands, jobs, and lives. And for a long while, of course, that is exactly what happened: American Football's sole album was a twinkling and circuitous entry in the annals of Midwest emo, remarkable for its musical tenderness and lyrical ellipses but largely unremarked upon, too.

But what happened over the next two decades is an inspiring saga of wonderful work slowly finding its audience. American Football went from cult classic to emo linchpin, its reputation and sales accreting like sand piling up in some endless hourglass. The little white house on its cover, a physical manifestation of the Anywhere, U.S.A. melancholy of its songs, became a musical landmark. Reunions, reissues, and two new albums followed, American Football finally climbing atop its own steady growth curve and staring out to the massive and enchanted crowd it had created, to the scene it had helped foster. Made at the end of the last century, American Football, or LP1, unequivocally stands as one of this century's most influential rock records.

When Polyvinyl released American Football in 1999, it was still an upstart label, an outgrowth of a fanzine with a simple business model and a pure passion for releasing the music co-founders Matt and Darcie Lunsford loved. They didn't gripe much, then, when their new trio splintered into other acts. Both label and band have grown in the quarter-century since in ways neither would have predicted. After a years-long hunt for the original Digital Audio Tapes and a subsequent quest for a machine that would render them properly, American Football has been lovingly remastered by original mastering engineer Jonathan Pines in Urbana's Private Studios, where it was recorded. The intertwined guitars have more sparkle, the drums more bounce and flash, the occasional bass more depth. This is the definitive version.

American Football

Steve Holmes - guitars, wurlitzer

Steve Lamos - drums, percussion, trumpet

Mike Kinsella - vocals, guitars, bass

Album Packaging Design by Joby Ford

Art Direction by Janelle Abad

DAT Tapes Photography by Jonathan Pines
Original Recording by Brendan Gamble at Private Studios Urbana, IL
Remastered by Jonathan Pines at Private Studios, Urbana, IL.
Original Photography by Chris Strong

Original Design by Chris Strong and Suraiya Nathan
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Illustrations by Brad Hale