Track of the Week: American Football bring light and shade on their much needed return ‘Bad Moons’
Despite the promise of a wildly different world on the other side of the millennium, I don’t think 1999 American Football would have predicted quite how bleak to outlook is.
Sure, they would have been mature enough to realise that nothing is a given, and some change would have beckoned. I don’t think they would have quite accounted for the amount of change actualised come 2026.
The social dystopia of today feels a world away from the pre-millennial optimism in which the band first emerged. Living in the backwash of Covid – the last time American Football last treated fans to new music – the outlook feels distinctly more bleak, and so band comebacks as anticipated as American Football’s feel slightly disconnected from the triumphant return many would dream of.
On ‘Bad Moons’, American Football are fully aware of that. The band who mastered the art of songwriting melancholy know full well that this is a moment for their return, but they don’t indulge in that with any glee. The eight-minute track that marks their return is almost remorseful in its guidance to a darker place, but once it gets you there, it envelopes you in a sense of calm understanding that oddly feels like the tonic to so many of our current woes.
The band stitch the past, through the narration of lead vocalist and guitarist Mike Kinsella’s childhood, with the darkness of a bleak future that actualises itself in adulthood to make a song of perfect dichotomy – with a melody that both haunts and charms, and lyrics that make you both laugh and cry.
“‘Bad Moons’ is actually a Frankenstein of two different demos we’d been passing around for quite a while,” Kinsella explained. “One playful, with children playing and toy pianos plinking; one brooding, with guitars screeching and drums bombasting.”
It was at first a contrast that was hard to stitch together, until Kinsella decided to “begin the song as a child. Or, rather…two. Stacked up in a single trench coat; secretly, reluctantly living the life of a grown man, accruing all of his missteps and guilt along the way.”
He continued, “By the end, these missteps are almost spilling out of the boys. A cathartic confession, hopefully at least somewhat relatable to anyone listening who’s ever lived a life.”
The end result mirrored the confusion we all face, as well as the frank reality that life has no sunny vista waiting on the horizon. 27 years after forming as a band and coming back with a single like ‘Bad Moons’ proves that life is about peaks and troughs, the light and dark that mark the everyday experiences as being deeply human.
We shouldn’t expect to feel one homogenised state of emotion and ‘Bad Moons’ soundtracks that. Which, in an age of emotional and societal isolation, is so desperately needed.
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