Ahead of the interview, the band’s team asked not to delve too deeply into lyrical specifics, given how intensely personal they are. No Feeling deals with suicidal ideation (‘No feeling, no pain, no-one to blame,’ laments Mike over a gorgeous, soothing melody that echoes like oblivion. ‘Forever awaits, it’s just an eternal blank page…’), while Bad Moons references his ex-wife and ends in a musically blissful spiral of existential bleakness. But what he does address is that fact that, though it captures a dark time, that’s all firmly in the past.
“The record was finished maybe a year ago,” he says, his head back in the sink, hair wet, ready to be bleached, “which means we started recording it a year before that, and writing it the year before that. So whatever came out of me then and is on the record…”
He trails off for a second, not so much from emotion but just to change the syntax of his sentence.
“I’m excited to play the songs and I’m excited to see people’s reactions,” he continues, “but now I’m processing whatever I’m going through currently. And that’ll be on the next record, but you won’t know or ask about it until I’ve already moved onto the next thing.” If that sounds snarky on paper, it’s not intended as such. It’s just his way of explaining, which he does with a kind of goofy grin on his face, that the dark snapshots on LP4 have, thankfully, been overcome.
Who knows what that next record will sound like, or what it’ll be about, but it will undoubtedly further cement the legacy and expand the vision of American Football. Or, as Steve says: “Weirdly, in pop culture, music is considered a young person’s thing, but music is an art form like anything else – and like anything else you get better at it, the longer you do it.”
In other words, LP4 is just the band’s latest hair colour. They’ve been dyeing it and bleaching it and changing its appearance for a while now, but beneath the platinum blond, the ethos, the passion, the emotion remains the same. Now, though, more and more people are finally getting to witness and experience those layers of their history. Because everyone should know and understand just how important this band were, are and will continue to be.