On October 21st Polyvinyl Records will release American Football. The new self-titled sophomore album from the celebrated band comes seventeen years after their debut. The first single “I’ve Been So Lost For So Long” is available to hear now (below), and on all DSPs tomorrow, August 24th. The band will play a series of album release shows in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and London over the coming months. Tickets go on sale Friday, August 26th, with pre-sale bundles available in the US and the UK on the 24th and 25th respectively.
Not long after Polyvinyl Records released American Football’s self-titled debut album in 1999, the band called it quits, having only played a smattering of Champaign-Urbana college house parties and sets at small clubs like Chicago’s legendary Fireside Bowl before taking their own divergent post-undergrad paths. Such an inauspicious turn of events made what followed all the more incredible. Over time, the record went on to become one of Polyvinyl’s best-selling releases to date, and ended up serving as “one of the single most influential rock records of its time” according to Noisey and many others.
When American Football announced in 2014 that they would play live for the first time in 15 years, the built up appreciation for that eponymous LP physically manifested itself as they sold out 3 nights at Webster Hall in New York City in a matter of hours, and then went on to do the same at venues around the world. A quarter of a lifetime removed, and at times thousands of miles away from the house on the sleepy street in the middle of Illinois depicted on their debut album’s iconic cover, they found themselves playing to sold out crowds that numbered in the thousands in London, Tokyo, Barcelona and beyond.
