LIES - Lies

LIES is the new project from American Football’s Mike and Nate Kinsella, representing the first time the cousin duo have written together without anyone else.  As the pair prepared to start writing new American Football tunes, perhaps noodling with guitars in the same room, Nate revealed a series of short synthesizer loops, potential prompts for a different sort of pop song. “I want to be in that band,” Mike remembers telling him. And so, now they are.

Their gripping self-titled debut, Lies, rewrites the way you think Nate and Mike should sound. These are explosive pop songs, riddled with striking hooks, powerhouse rhythms, sweeping strings and glorious amounts of keyboard and synth melodies enough to excite the Depeche Mode and Tears For Fears faithful. Using this record to chart the sometimes-difficult terrain of what it is to navigate a relationship, to power past feelings of deceit and doubt and move forward toward an amorphous hope, Lies is a remarkably cohesive and complete portrait of what it means to feel your way through a world built on human connection. These songs are so mighty that you feel like you’re right there for the rides between drama and possible redemption. 

But there’s also a wonderful if unintentional irony to the album, too, because this is actually the truth of two people following shared muses, of indulging sounds they love simply because, well, they love them.

 FFO: American Football, Owen, Depeche Mode, Tears For Fears