American Football were a band destined to flourish in a specific time and place—it just happened to come at the turn of this decade, 10 years or so after they stopped making new music. Earnest, energetic and often ignored by critics, late-90s, Midwestern emo—defined by American Football, Braid and the Promise Ring—was ripe for reassessment around 2010 and fittingly found its audience in a moment where indie shifted hard towards avant-R&B cool and college-quad chill. Regardless of when this new vanguard emerged, it’s proven incredibly resilient, with nearly all of its scene leaders releasing their best work in the past year. Unlike, say, freak-folk or dance-punk, emo in the 2010s doesn’t seem like a reactionary microtrend so much as the current prevailing sound of indie rock. And its single biggest influence is American Football’s sole, self-titled album of elliptical, post-rock and jazz-inflected emo, which transmogrified from one of the many short-lived and modestly revered offshoots of the Cap’n Jazz family tree (i.e., Friend/Enemy, Owls, Make Believe) to an essential part of the canon—steering the genre from Hot Topic and Warped Tour into headier territory. Earlier this year, Mike Kinsella told us American Football never intended “to be popular, or even be a band.” They’re unquestionably both now, and the second American Football might be the most highly anticipated emo album ever made.

Kinsella is too self-deprecating to milk whatever mystique American Football has accumulated; LP2 exists because the band enjoyed touring but was tired of having to play the same songs. He’s also too self-aware to not acknowledge that LP2 has expectations. “Where are we now?” he asks on the first new American Football song of the 21st century. “Both home alone, in the same house”—you know, like the one on both album covers. The title of each song here is the first line; on American Football, they were the last line. The think pieces write themselves.

But upon establishing this type of secret-handshake rapport with the diehard listener, the type for whom this is the equivalent of anxiously awaited, decades-spanning sequels m b v or Wildflower or Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...Pt. 2, “Where Are We Now?” pivots and speaks to the festival crowds and the 3,000-cap rooms. For one thing, there’s a chorus— something that American Football lacked altogether—a klieg-lighted, waltz-time sway with moaning guitar leads, the kind that typified Sunny Day Real Estate in their later prog phase. The 4/4 kick drum thump in the first verse of lead single “I’ve Been So Lost For So Long” works on a similar level—the crowd is going to clap along to this one, it’s “the hit” now. While the new wave of emo hasn’t yet produced a Jimmy Eat World-level crossover, these songs ask, why not American Football themselves?

Produced in spurts of Dropbox exchanges and playdates over the span of two years, but working on a strict deadline, LP2 stresses proficiency and immediacy. Play it back-to-back with the original, knocked out in a weekend with college graduation looming, and Kinsella’s stated belief that American Football circa-2016 is a massive upgrade doesn’t seem all that heretical. The production is bracingly bright and crisp compared to the overcast American Football, hitting like the first true fall chill after a muggy Indian summer. They’re also sharper songwriters than they were as University of Illinois undergrads—the twin guitars no longer intermingle with fuzzy friction, they’re gridlocked into Pinback-like metronomy on “My Instincts Are the Enemy,” while “Desire Gets in the Way” punches out of the somber Side B, almost indistinguishable from Kinsella’s punkier protegees from Into It. Over It.

Sturdy song structures, legitimate hooks, a full-time bassist (Mike’s cousin, Nate Kinsella)—some of this can be seen as troubleshooting for a bigger audience. But the aspect upon which every opinion on LP2 will hinge is that American Football has a *frontman *now. There are no instrumentals or even the extended passages of “Honestly?” and “Stay Home” that predicted the sweeping post-emo of The World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die and Foxing. With his vocals pushed pop-star high in the mix, Kinsella is a dominating presence, and LP2 sounds suspiciously familiar. Nine songs of Mike Kinsella assessing his self-worth in taut, spare songs of spindly guitar and tenderized vocals, well—that essentially describes Kinsella’s long-running solo project Owen.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Owen albums are consistently pretty good, but there are nine of them: including one that came out not three months ago. The King of Whys is the first Owen release to follow the American Football reboot and whether or not that was responsible for a heightened interest in the project, the album was recorded with a full band and an outside producer who likes the same bells, whistles and trumpets—it’s the Owen record that sounds the most like American Football.

For fans who want a second masterwork as vindication for American Football, LP2 doesn’t exude the stakes it should, not when it’s so easy to see “Empty Bottle” and the Volcano Choir-esque “Settled Down” as possibly culled from the same well of inspiration that provides “I Need a Drink (Or Two, or Three)” and the “Holocene”-esque “Home Is Where the Haunt Is.” In a more tangible way, the rebrand of American Football as a straightforward songwriting outfit inevitably relegates their inventive musicianship to the periphery. Within limited pockets of space, “Give Me the Gun” reconfigures American Football’s history to place them as contemporaries and neighbors of Tortoise as well as acolytes of Steve Reich and the Blue Nile. Meanwhile, the spiraling codas of “Born to Lose” and “I Need a Drink (Or Two or Three)” are layered, nuanced, emotionally complex and in sharp contrast to the record’s clunkiest vocals (“dead eyes, why such vulgarity?,” “I can’t break this bender, to it I surrender”).

And as he is on Owen records, Kinsella is a high-variance kind of lyricist here. Kinsella admitted that he was writing lyrics for LP2 until the last minute and at points, it's questionable whether he would've been better off spending more effort writing or less. Stock phrases can work as mantras when they stay within their cadence (“Home Is Where the Haunt Is”) and other times, lyrics that read embarrassing from a guy pushing 40 can conceivably work in an arrested-development, Beach-Slang sort of way. Then again, James Alex’s sole purpose is to remain in his 20s; when Kinsella plaintively sings, “Doctor it hurts when I exist” and “I’m as blue as the sky is gray...I’m gonna die this way,” it’s unclear whether they’re meant to be taken at face value, or if we’re all supposed to see it as an emo elder statesman playing the role for laughs.

But this question doesn’t really change the nature of the band—American Football wasn’t some self-released obscurity in 1999 when Kinsella was best known as a former member of Cap’n Jazz and even then, “I’ll See You When We’re Both Not So Emotional” alone proves Kinsella doesn’t see sincerity and self-awareness as opposed. But even if the influences and underlying sentiments are quite similar this time out, American Football shouldn’t be expected to musically, or emotionally, express themselves the same way they did when they were in their late teens. Made by, and largely for, college-aged emo fans, American Football reflected a time when hours on end could spent staring off into the distance to consider the changing leaves and lost loves while “The One With the Wurlitzer” faded out. In 2016, the members of American Football have spouses, kids, publishing careers, office jobs, the things that makes nostalgia for a bygone moment an indulgence rather than a sustainable worldview. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, LP2 is by and for people who are lucky to find a half hour a week in which to get wistful.