The band American Football released their fourth self-titled LP in May. They are no longer the band they were in the late '90s, when their debut EP and album somehow developed a cult status that has endured to this day. Today they are a middle-aged band making a much more adult imagining of emo music. LP4 is soft, wistful, jazzy indie-rock music with singer Mike Kinsella deep and tender vibrato working on an ASMR level as well as a lyrical one. It's one of the best releases of the year, specifically because it is largely incongruous with any other music being made. It is patient, smooth, and mature, a true, properly sequenced album that is more than the sum of its parts. It is not necessarily a record out of time, as much as its beyond timeliness. It is lost in its world and asks you to get lost with it, which is one of the defining qualities of all of American Football's music.

If you were to ask an American Football fan what makes that first album from 1999 so magical, they'd likely struggle to put it into words. I don't think even the band could explain it to you. It's a credit to them that they've never really tried to replicate it. In Ian Cohen's Pitchfork review of the record, he writes about the band's, and that particular album's, special appeal:

Very little of

American Footballis in a minor key and almost none of it can be performed on a single guitar, so it’s not explicitly heartbroken music, nor is it ever entirely joyous. Rather than pinpoint an emotion, the record exists on a continuum. There’s no right answer as to whether “The Summer Ends” is a devotional, a last goodbye, or some combination of the two—the ache and beauty are intertwined.

There is a freewheeling experimentation throughout LP1. Moments that initially feel like mistakes are seen through until they stop feeling like mistakes. There are off notes, and an unsteady rhythm that has come to be known as math rock. Songs start one way, and then transition into different styles and speeds or with new instruments thrown in. Over top of it all floats Kinsella's voice, his lyrical investigations of youthful emotions, written in concise sentences and fragments. The opening lines of "Honestly?"—"Honestly, I can't remember/All my teenage feelings, and their meanings/They seemed too, see-through, to be true"—feel like the thesis for the entire record. An effort to musically represent the fuzzy, incomplete moments of growing up and the feelings that came with them. The result was an album that came the closest to capturing the essence of youth. It's an album that continues to have a profound effect on every generation of young people discovering it for the first time.

I discovered American Football sometime near the end of high school. I was interested in the emo rock of my time, and knew enough music snobs who suggested I check out "midwestern emo," starting with American Football. Both the EP and the first album made an immediate, deep impression on me. It was not the kind of project I'd expect other kids at school to have even heard of. The cover photo of a suburban home had that Backrooms effect of feeling familiar yet strange. Kinsella's lyrics were clear but also left you hanging, requiring more contemplation. And maybe most important to the mystique was there were no other projects. American Football disbanded almost as quickly as it had formed, treated essentially like a short-lived side project for everyone involved. For that reason, for the longest time, being into American Football was like being part of a secret emo club. A place for the "real headz," so to speak. Just like youth, it was here for a brief, glorious moment and then it was gone.

When, after nearly a decade and a half apart, the band reunited in 2014, first to do shows and then to make new music, I was concerned. I felt the same pain in my stomach as I get when I see that something I loved as a kid is getting rebooted. Was this just an attempt to capitalize off of cheap nostalgia by soiling a core memory? What ultimately worked in American Football's favor is that they did not try to be the same band from 1999. The reunited American Football is like a much more expansive version of what Kinsella had been doing with Owen, his solo act. It is a true soft indie-rock band made for adults, about adult feelings. And, importantly, adult experiences: divorces, kids, responsibilities—the stuff of mid-life crises. Despite the fact that they might be more popular now than they've ever been, mainly due to all the subsequent generations that discovered their '90s work, American Football operates with the understanding that they could never be those young people again. Instead, they treat their first album as this perfect diamond that has enticed audiences, and while you're here maybe you'll like this newer music for a more adult you.

There's something beautiful about that to me, and I feel it when I listen to LP4. One of the most endearing aspects of the much-maligned emo genre has always been its outlook on "the band" as a concept. A group of like-minded people getting together to jam and record until it has run its course, for whatever reason. Bands come and go, people come and go, but the jamming is eternal. In that way emo is truer to its underlying punk ethos than most of punk's other, more respected spinoffs.

LP4 is full of the jamming, experimental, jazzy spirit of before, but its mood is darker and more foreboding. Kinsella's lyrics are less forthcoming but more sophisticated. On album standout "Bad Moons," he sings: "I've been so many boys in this trench coat/Ask my ex-wife/She met Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide." That's the stuff. We are proudly middle age and no more understanding of what's going on than we were as teenagers. But that doesn't mean we have to keep acting like teens.

LP4 is a grim album, some might say mopey and melodramatic. It is a record full of disappointment and a feeling that it's too late for things to get better. There's no future to look forward to, no potential to realize, nothing new left to experience. At this age, you are who you are and you're meant to guide a new generation through their development and possibility. Whether that's actually true, I understand the feeling. The desire to feel sorry for yourself, re-litigate the past, and agonize over what you should've done differently. The old heartaches you both resent and fetishize. Emo has always been a youthful genre, partially because of its punk roots but also because only a young person could be so whiny and get away with it. But I embrace American Football's journey to old-man emo rock. Every release gives you a new experience that only they can provide, and who knows, maybe another 30 years from now, the post-2016 American Football will have built a cult following all of its own.