It's not to say that this album finds them in opposition to their younger selves that wrote 'Never Meant', but nearly 30 years on from that, approaching their 50s, they're changed in so many ways. Both Mike and the band's guitarist, Steve Holmes, have had their marriages end (in part due to the band) in the time since American Football released their last album. That weight falls heavily on this album.

For Mike, his infidelity led to the end of his 15-year marriage. "I made my bed, and I lied in it," is the first line on the album. Under the red light, away from the house, he details betrayal, thoughts of suicide, shame and addiction candidly, wryly and poetically.

He wrote this album in between taking his teenage kids to basketball or doing laundry. "There's sometimes… often… bourbon involved," he concedes. Mike is understandably cautious about giving more away when the album, after all, says so much. What he will say is that his approach was to focus on things he hadn't gotten over and was still trying to reconcile.

'Bad Moons', the album's lead single, is the most unflinching self-examination of the singer's double life. Holding up a mirror, he confesses, "I lost my mind in the dark / I told all my lies in the dark / I poured my drinks in the dark / I explored new kinks in the dark," and he continues down a hole as the music swells until the sun rises to the sound of far-away children in the background.

"It's kind of heavy. It's kind of grim," he explains before throwing out the word "fatalistic". Despite that, the goal for him was acceptance.

"In my mind, it's like when you leave church, and you're like, 'Okay, I got one week to accumulate more sins, but I feel good right now'. I think that was the goal," he says with a smile.

And, while it might fall short of redemption, by 'No Soul To Save', the album's finale, Mike strikes a more defiant tone. "I already said I'm sorry for everything and I won't say it again," he sings.

"There's a lot of dark shit in there," Steve says, discussing the tone of the album. He adds, "There's an acceptance and a gravitas to these words and music that a young person couldn't have written or put across in the same way. I think that's what's exciting about writing music in middle age.

"This is real shit. It's not your teenage relationship broke up, it's much more serious, real-life stuff and real consequences, and I think, because of that, it's much more powerful and impactful."

Steve then clarifies that people should not worry about their singer, despite the album's lyrical content. "The lyrical Mike and the actual Mike are two different things. He's a hilarious, fun person to be around."

"Sometimes an asshole…" Mike interjects.

"Occasionally an asshole," he replies, and they laugh.

The shift in the songwriting feels like the most immediate change on 'LP4', but that darkness seeps into what the band have created musically. "More than ever, I'm writing to the songs," Mike begins.

There have been times where American Football have felt in juxtaposition between their bright, precise instrumentation and their lyrical content, especially on the last album. To a certain extent, Steve agrees: "I think every record is a progression from the last but the second and third records are a little too clean and perfect for me," he says.

Nate Kinsella, Mike's cousin and the band's bassist and mastermind behind their live shows, also saw more coherence. He adds, "Ideas were getting laid down along the way as we worked out the music, so we had a sense of where things were going. There was some cross-pollination between the music and the lyrics that tightened how things are woven together."

Still, for Mike, coming to the band with the songs did come with some trepidation. "Once the band didn't veto stuff and put me in rehab or therapy, then I felt okay with my decisions, and I'm comfortable being vulnerable," he admits.

Mike continues to explain his process on 'LP4' to create a more cohesive, unified tone. He points to the opening track, 'Man Overboard', as the pinnacle of that approach. "That song started as an insane drum beat. Literally just a three-minute loop of that drum beat," he explains, referring to drummer Steve Lamos's scrappy and bounding performance.

"Then we just carved this eerie melody on top of it," he continues. "In my mind, it sounds like seasickness."

From there, he placed himself on that boat, lost, rudderless in every sense, as the waves began to rise. He sings lines like "God never taught me how to swim / Just how to sink" before the song opens with jagged electronic edges, spiralling siren sounds, and Lamos's drumbeat crashing back in.

It's not all just relentlessly bleak. On songs like 'Patron Saint of Pale', they have a little fun. "[It] is so playful," he smiles. "I was living with this chorus: 'Let's play Rochambeau', and I didn't even know what it meant. I didn't even know what I was singing about," he laughs.

"And then I got to put my own spin on it to make it a little darker."

The song, for all its playfulness, is about suggesting Rock, Paper, Scissors to his imminently-ex wife as a way of avoiding the divorce papers. The playful flourish was the children's vocals, which lift the chorus as he sings, "If you win I'll never ask to play again / I'll come home like nothing ever happened."

"It just makes it somehow more playful and darker too. We're aware of that. It's all conceptual, and to pull it off is totally awesome. It's fun. I'm proud of us," he reflects.

The band all credit the time they took to make 'LP4' to what has ultimately led to it being a record they are truly proud of. They've been on record that they rushed into 'LP2', capitalising on the adrenaline of their return. 'LP3' explored new ground, but the process of making it "didn't really work" according to Mike. "The product worked better than the process, to be honest," he states. It's in this album that they have found themselves at their best.

"We're in a better place now than we've ever been as a band," Steve asserts.

However, it wasn't completely intentional to take so long away. It was while touring in 2019 that Mike's marriage disintegrated, and so they planned to take a break. The pandemic stretched it out, and writing via Zoom wasn't working for anyone at that point. Those virtual sessions (and his work-life balance) led Steve Lamos to decide to leave the band.

Steve's absence from American Football called into question what future they had. "It was obvious pretty quick he isn't replaceable," Mike says. "I don't know anybody else who plays or hears music how he hears it and plays drums how he plays. The biggest take for me was, 'This can't happen without him'."

So they waited. Mike and Nate worked on LIES, their synth-driven side-project. Owen put out new music. American Football got a bunch of bands like Manchester Orchestra, Iron & Wine and Ethel Cain to make covers of their first album. Steve returned almost two years to the day from announcing he was leaving.

Steve Holmes reflects, "That gap all gave us like a newfound appreciation for the band and for each other and the family we have as a touring party." Mike echoes the sentiment, adding, "Everybody seems to be on more of a similar page than ever. We're all willing to try something new in a way we weren't five or ten years ago."

'We're all like, 'Does that fit in the American Football world? Well, it does now'. We should keep pushing the boundaries a little bit."

Even Lamos seemed changed. Nate recalls the first time he heard Mike shout "Fuck it" in the chorus of 'Patron Saint of Pale' and instantly thinking "Oh boy, I wonder what Lamos is going to think" as he is usually the stickler against any profanity. To everyone's surprise, he was on board.

Mike puts a lot of it down to maturing. They broke up at 21. They got back together in their late 30s, and they're still growing and learning.

"Being in a band is like dating seven other people," he imparts. "There are ebbs and flows of which factions are closer or further apart, and hopefully you're always critiquing yourself and seeing how everything's fitting together."

They returned in time to celebrate 25 years of 'LP1' with a worldwide tour. They saw their audiences somehow getting younger rather than older in each new city. They seemed to go from strength to strength with each new show, too. "We recorded the live album in LA and, then by the end of that tour, a year later, we were playing things way better,' Steve says and jokes, "We preserved for posterity a slightly worse version than what we got to by the end of that tour, but what do you do? That's life."

It was a long tour, and for all the nostalgia on stage, the band were firmly moving forward with the new album off it. "It was really fun to bounce back and forth," Nate remembers and details having the balance of having the familiarity and confidence in playing the shows while having the unknowns of the new material in between.

Sonny DiPerri, who had worked with the Kinsellas on LIES, joined to produce the album. The work and bonds they'd built on the side-project had set the foundations for how they wanted 'LP4' to work from an assembly perspective. The cousins learned to work creatively remotely for that record, piling ideas up and then organising them while miles apart. They did "tonnes of pre-production" according to Steve. When they eventually got to the studio, songs were fully written and arranged, with each one completely mapped out.

"That made the studio time super fun," Nate explains. "There wasn't the stress of "wait, what are we writing?" We got in there and really focused on getting it as close to what we had in our heads as possible, and then there was time to play around with overdubs and whatever ideas somebody had.'

'We could spend time on it because we'd already laid down the foundation for everything, so we weren't taking time away from the big picture.'

'We got to work on the fun little details."

And with Sonny in the studio, there was encouragement to worry less about perfection and more about what felt right.

"I remember being really excited that Lamos was gonna go track drums, just him and Sonny, and he was just gonna cut loose," Nate remembers. "I knew then we were going to have a much different-feeling record' 

' These drums are going to sound like they're in a room," he adds while Steve nods along, harking back to his complaint that they'd sounded too polished. 

Nate recalls thinking, "We're not gonna get under a microscope like we had previously with them."

"This set the tone for the whole thing because he [Lamos] went out first, and we were like: "Okay, cool, we're humans. We're doing it like this. We're just letting it rip." That was a fun element to bring in for sure."

That organic feel gave them more space to play, and Mike is quick to credit Sonny for his work in organising and showcasing how rich the album is. "There's so much in almost every moment on the album. There are a lot of different things that could pull your attention, and he made everything blend, highlighting the correct things at the correct times," he says.

There are layers and layers within every track, constantly shifting in and out of focus, with extra piano, vibraphone, synths, and that classic American Football flourish with the horn, all just adding depth to the record. It's a source of pride for them that they didn't back away when things seemed hard or impossible. They went and found a church choir in Africa that could sing to their unconventional time signature. They worked on every possible arrangement on 'Wake Her Up' to find the right way. Mike gesticulates, imagining the mixing desk, as he fades up and down the different sliders. "Where does it all happen, and how do you make it flow? How do you make it clever? How do you make it seem seamless or seem like every time something moves, there's an impact?" he stresses.

For all the extra time to be "playful", 'LP4' doesn't reinvent the wheel in terms of how they want an album to be structured or flow. Instead, they have cherry-picked and built upon the best decisions they've made in the past. Both 'The One with the Piano' and 'Lullabye' are instrumental tracks on the album; the former being an intentional nod to their debut. Nate, as a fan of that first album as an outsider when it was released, wanted those interludes to be embraced again. "Not everything has to be a grand musical journey," he reasons.

"Sometimes it's nice to just have a little instrumental thing that sounds nice," he simplifies. "They just felt natural and right."

'The One with the Piano' showcases the live feeling of the record, with its voice note quality and the chatter between Nate and Lamos bracketing the conversation between the piano and horn. It might be the simplest and most stark moment on the album, but for Nate, it is a track he really remembers fondly.

"Such a fun afternoon," he recalls. "Just sitting down for a few hours and just feeling it out. We hadn't really done that before."

Those moments to breathe on the album feel like a direct result of their extensive touring, too.

In their younger years, they relied on Lamos to pick up the horn while they tuned and retuned between songs – one of the pitfalls of being a band that barely plays in one key for very long. Then, when Cory Bracken joined their touring band as part of their reunion, he began making these interstitial tracks that would keep the show moving, bleeding from one key to the next. According to Steve, "He built up a Dropbox of around thirty of these vibe-y things and some of them ended up being inspiration for tracks on the new album."

The other major carryover on 'LP4' is the number of guest features. Following the success of bringing in Hayley Williams, Elizabeth Powell, and Rachel Goswell on their last album, Mike was somewhat brazen in the belief that they could find more great people this time. "I felt so spoiled from 'LP3' and all the collaborations that I was overly confident," he admits. Think 'Field of Dreams' and "If you build it, they will come", and you're in the mindset he had. He wrote the parts confident they would find someone.

Cathlin De Marrais of Rainer Maria is like an apparition throughout 'Blood on My Blood' while Wisp's Natalie Lu joins on 'Wake Her Up'. "She killed it. It became this ghostly little thing that pops up," Mike says, beaming. "After she did it, I'm like: 'Well…that should happen more', so we used it at the end, then tied the two together."

The other addition is Turnstile's Brendan Yates, who joins for the album's second track, 'No Feeling'. Mike recalls it being super "cool" and "casual" to have the singer just casually pop by the studio. The plan and what was initially sold to Brendan was for him to be part of some gang vocals on the track. They'd get as many people together and keep chanting the line like a mantra while standing around a microphone.

"He did it, and I think he was doing it in my range, and then he was hearing this high harmony," Mike explains. "Then when he hit the high harmony, it was like: "Oh fuck! That's the guy from Turnstile." It suddenly sounded like Turnstile.'

'There's that moment where it's collaboration. I didn't hear it either until he hit it. I was like "Holy fuck! That's awesome."

The "gang vocal" became Brendan's. "It was truly his," Mike says.

"So…happy accident-ish," he adds with a smile and a shrug.

"That's a great example of the sum is greater than the parts. I'd heard him sing, obviously, and I'd heard that part, but it wasn't until it was happening that I was like, 'Oh my God, this is perfect'." Nate joins in.

He then recalls the bemused look Sonny gave him and their touring bandmate, Mike Garzon, when asked whether their voices would still be needed on the track. The Turnstile singer had made the part his own. They were not required.

The continued success of these collaborations, especially when you think about the cover version of 'LP1' a few years back, too, brings to life the magic of American Football, with their influence that pulls almost anybody into their orbit. It's a gift, but not one they take for granted.

"[I] feel incredibly lucky to have these people willing to contribute. It's weird to be creatively invested in somebody else's thing, and then they take time and effort to do it is awesome," Mike reflects.

You could attribute their power to their individual and collective prowess as technically brilliant musicians. Sure. You could chalk it up to the folklore and underground movement that kept the slightest embers alight, fueled by a burgeoning fanbase at the advent of the internet. That works too. Perhaps it's the emotional resonance of that first album that remains just as poignant a quarter of a century later.

On 'LP4', though, they're authentically representing themselves, here and now. They're defying anyone who thinks they might have softened with age.

Steve is clear. "The way we've come off in press and the way the band has been presented previously, it's been a bit of "Oh shucks, we're these middle-aged dads" but, with this album and where we're going, there's a recognition of: "No, we're actually pretty fucking good.""

And it's true. 'LP4' finds American Football at their best. It might seem trivial that they got out of the house for their artwork, but symbolically, it casts a long shadow over what people expect of them. Time put rose-tinted glasses on American Football, and while they embraced that in their reunion, it never really suited them. The reality is not rose-tinted. It's darker. It's red.

They stepped outside. They hope others will follow.

Steve compares it to the experience people have with Radiohead; the album you hear in your formative years is the one that has a lasting legacy. Are you an 'OK Computer' kid or a 'Kid A' type of person?

Mike is hopeful. "It'd be cool if people heard this and didn't pay attention to that it is an American Football album," he says.

"I don't know if it's possible. I'm excited to see if it's possible."

American Football's new album 'LP4' is out now.