We’re SO INCREDIBLY STOKED to share that American Football have announced a new album, American Football, due out on 10/21/2016!

Hear the first single from the album, “I’ve Been So Lost For So Long,” right now below or via Pitchfork here.

Pre-orders are available now on Early Bird Edition 180-Gram Metallic Gold vinyl (limited to 3,000), 180-Gram Orange vinyl, CD, Cassette (Metallic Gold Tape), and bundles with a set of four 12”x12” Chris Strong art prints, pennant, and a new t-shirt design!

During its brief tenure, American Football had released only a dozen songs through an EP and LP on Polyvinyl, a small-town Illinois label but a few years old itself. The group had played a handful of shows and quietly disbanded, three mostly anonymous Illinois kids who made some music and then moved on to other acts and interests. Singer Mike Kinsella had started Owls and Owen, and drummer and trumpeter Steve Lamos had bounced around with several different projects.

But American Football’s legacy—of earnest, emotional songs stretched taut over a slyly complicated musical framework of shifting rhythms and glimmering guitars—grew even without the band’s continued involvement. Its only album, American Football,eventually sold more than 100,000 copies, a cult classic that turned into an indie rock touchstone.

During the past two years, American Football has played forty shows for bigger crowds than they would have dared imagine. And this relaunch has come not as a trio but instead with Mike’s cousin and bandmate, Nate, stepping in as American Football’s first bassist. (“Why would you want to ruin that band with bass?” Nate remembers as his quip when they first asked.) And almost all along, the band has slowly worked new material into those sets, playing an early version of “I’ve Been Lost for So Long” at one of those first dates. The old friends were having such a good time, Kinsella says, that they forced themselves to write even more new material “so we’d have an excuse to get together again every few weeks.”

And they’ve done it: At last, American Football’s effort to build upon a very small but very significant body of work retroactively has led to its stunning second self-titled album. It is a magnetic nine-track record that reaffirms what so many have loved for so long about American Football while updating the band’s approach to reflect the experience and wisdom the members have gained in the intervening seventeen years, too.

These songs are not as doleful as they once might have been, though they are more emotionally complex and vulnerable, embracing and exploring the nuances of feeling your way through adulthood. In these tunes, being in love doesn’t mean not being sad, and being satisfied doesn’t mean not feeling confused. “Maybe I’m asleep and this is all a dream/I can’t believe my life is happening to me,” Kinsella sings at one point, perfectly capturing that very grown-up push and pull.

As American Football looks ahead as a new band at new dates, new material, and a new legacy, that’s the essence they care the most to maintain.

“I don’t want American Football to become this popular monster. But I also don’t want to fade away or something, either,” says Mike. “I want to maintain this comfort we finally have with this band now. We’re just enjoying it.”