lies
[Photo by Shervin Lainez]

How LIES (Mike and Nate Kinsella) used their emo past to make a daring new future

Alternative Press teamed up with LIES for exclusive vinyl, limited to 250 copies. Head to the AP Shop to snag yours.

By all accounts, LIES are a band that shouldn’t exist.

When Mike and Nate Kinsella began writing for American Football VI in early 2020, the sounds they found forming were far from the guitar lines that transcended emo and launched hundreds of bands for over two decades.

Instead, they discovered electronic swells and majestic, lush sonics that sparkled in the dawn of the Kinsellas’ youth. The kind that expands and contracts into the goth-laden, theatrical realms of the Cure and Depeche Mode, and Nine Inch Nails — touchstones Mike and Nate point to — as much as they relish in poptastic arena jams akin to Robyn. But as these sessions progressed, and the world began shutting down, the fourth chapter of American Football was placed on hold. Yet, LIES were only getting started. 

Read more: How AbsolutePunk.net helped emo fans find an online community from the early ’00s-2010s

“’Oh, I could just sing like David Gahan from Depeche Mode. I don’t have to pretend they’re American Football songs,’” Mike starts on the moment he realized LIES could become its own entity. The initial idea was a simple one. “It was supposed to be these seven-inches every three or four months for a couple of years,” he reveals. “And each one was supposed to have its own artwork,” but with the vinyl pressing-plant industry in the chokehold of numerous major-label re-releases and pop stars shilling 50-odd variants of the same album, this idea was nixed. The shadow of such an idea remains, however. Following along the path of Lies, each track is paired, in the same manner as would’ve been presented over the course of two years. But being able to inspect as a whole gives more away to the project’s DNA. 

Lies is the culmination of two cousins reminding themselves just how fun music can be. Ushered into existence with mixing engineer Sonny DiPerri, it’s never been a target they were driving toward, Mike recalls, but the electro-goth sounds have been a proponent for as long as he remembers. Recounting one particular moment from a public speaking class back in school where the words for American Football’s “I’ll See You When We’re Both Not So Emotional” were being doodled, “I remember in my notebook, I was trying to write a Depeche Mode song lyrically,” he says. “The reason I was writing towards that is that I’m a fan. And the reason it happened now, 27 years later, is because it just fortuitously came together where I didn’t feel like I had to write.”

The album was simply an idea that kept spiraling. But the name Kinsella is no stranger to emo devotees the world over. Not with just American Football, but through an intertwining tree with branches leading to a fruitful plethora of musical projects, including emo second-wave pioneers Cap’n Jazz and, most notably, Joan of Arc, where the two cousins have collaborated previously. 

But it’s American Football that established Mike’s ability to evoke feelings with sparse strings of words delicately woven around spacious, emotive music. This thread is where the Kinsella name resides, sparking up generation-spanning adornment with aplomb. Lies contains the same level of emotional evocation, but this time erring toward the dramatic — an homage without being derivative. “Rouge Vermouth” is unashamedly ‘80s in its sounds, with intense drums propelling melodrama. But there’s also often hope. “Blemishes” opens the album with optimistic trickles of electronic yelps, while “Echoes” glides through its delicate haze accompanied by saxophone. The meticulousness of everything stitched together is staggering. Melody is often sparked up against intricately combative stitched soundscapes. “Knife” even sees Mike howling to a forlorn lover while a crowd applauds in the background. 

“A lot of these songs are heavy and dark, but it’s also karaoke in a way,” Mike laughs. “I don’t mean to diminish it because we combed over every little detail. It’s not like we recorded it flippantly at all, but I think even that element we’re cool with — even that’s intentional. I’m singing in ways I never really sang before.” Of “Corbeau,” Mike says, “I think it might be the song I’ve always wanted to write for 30 years, and finally wrote it.”

The Lies process has helped the Kinsellas break out of the parameters they’d inadvertently set themselves after being active artists for so long. For Mike, who reveals he’s also “in the middle of recording Owen stuff,” he admits that he’s “more laid back about it. I think, ‘Oh, that’s a happy accident’ instead of trying to get every little finger-pick perfect.” 

Exhaling and taking a moment allowed the cousins to reset their creative clocks. Often being too focused on what they currently do rather than what they could do. “That’s a lot of my excuse for my overdrinking,” he cackles. “I’m like, ‘Well, this is how I write songs — I just drink and then songs come out,’ [but] me and Nate were having Sunday Zooms at 10 a.m.” LIES also wound up removing any pressures, including, as Mike deadpans “I mean, it’s not paying the bills. So, yeah, make it fun.”

Becoming a permanent fixture of American Football in 2014, Nate rivals Mike for an abundance of creativity. Helming production duties on various Polyvinyl (their label home since 1999) projects, as well as anything else he can get his hands on. While both are family men, Mike has the enigmatic personality of a frontman of 20-plus years, who turns writing out at bars into lyrically lush and eccentric tracks, while Nate has a more focused energy, which fits with him being the architect of LIES’ woven sonic fabric, with the project boasting each’s personality.

“I’ve always loved, specifically, Depeche Mode, [but] we never quite got industrial. Growing up, I was always into Ministry and the Chicago Wax Trax scene and just synth stuff in general,” Mike says of his influences. “The first songs I ever wrote were on a Casio keyboard in sixth grade, just like low bass.” He even explains, “There are two or three Cure songs, you know? So they’re all kind of cover songs in a way…or in our heads at least.”

“[Nine Inch Nails] put in a lot of organic sounds. Nothing sounds straight out of the box with them. I think that’s what is so cool,” Nate says to this influence. “There will be these weird vocalizations screaming or whatever — it’s all vibe setting. I love it when bands put sound effects in their music. I talk about this one a lot, the opening of ‘Feel The Pain,’ that Dinosaur Jr. song that sounds like it’s got a cork coming out of the bottle.”

With Lies becoming fully fleshed out in remote sessions held during the pandemic, finding this solace in creativity became a core part of Nate’s coping in that time. “It’s a funny place to be when there are terrible things happening,” he admits. “I think it’s healthy to take care of yourself. Everyone should be able to give themselves the space to go do that.”

It’s also a rarity to be able to embrace so many different facets of your creativity within one career span, and if any name belongs to the term “prolific,” it’s the cousin Kinsella. This is by design for the pair, as they’re far more inclined to pursue a project rather than simmer in the afterglow of any previous endeavors. “When you are sitting down to write for a couple of hours, but things aren’t clicking, you’re like, ‘Oh man, this sucks. I’m really not good at this. What am I doing? I’m good at dishes. I’ll go do the dishes!’” Nate laughs. 

Seemingly speaking the same musical language, Nate recalls being amazed after seeing the jazz trio Medeski Martin & Wood. “They were playing, and they were just finishing each other’s sentences musically. It was all improvised. I was just totally blown away by how well they were just communicating musically,” he says. “I was like, ‘I want to have a relationship with somebody like that.’ How crazy would that be? I feel like this with me and Mike,” who concurs. “I feel like you’ll hit play, and then we both listen back for 30 seconds, and 99% of the time, it’s the same answer.”

With their relationship entering new realms of the same territory, the cousins remain the understated elder statesmen, and continued proponents, of emo’s second wave. In their 40s now, this opportunity has allowed them to embrace getting older without sacrificing any youthful ambition and exuberance. 

“I think American Football, it’s definitely dad rock, but I think we’re just like, ‘Fuck it.’ [For LIES], we can just make wild videos, and even the dramatic stuff I think it works. Nate’s mixing and production, and Sonny’s mixing of the songs, really, I think they sound fantastic. But even the dramatic stuff is almost so over the top, it’s funny.”

The words are where this drama comes to life. In their written state, the lyrics seem as if they could be scribblings from a high school notebook. “Camera Chimera”’s impassioned howls of “I’m gonna die/n this floor/Forever/Scarred and scared/Too impaired to even care” sweep through, but with a tongue-in-cheek nod to the dramatic grip his own initial offerings still hold for many.

As for the abandoned American Football IV sessions, Mike puts it down to band practices being incompatible with a Zoom world. “To have four different people be like, ‘I don’t know, should there be a crash cymbal there? Or should it be over here?’ It’s the opposite of fun.”

There’s also the element of LIES being a fusing between Mike and Nate, with little room for American Football to interlope. “I think as me and Nate were excited about how different everything was sounding than American Football songs, a couple of other guys were less excited about it, whatever the opposite of excited is…almost stressed about it? Sure, Nate hears whatever is happening in his head, but I think somebody else is like, ‘Well, this isn’t how American Football songs sound.’”

But this is how LIES sound. A project that represents exuberant freedom from its moodiest moments to the most soaring hope-filled ones. “I appreciate Nate’s thing earlier about bouncing around other projects,” Mike says. “I think maybe earlier in my career — which I never really thought it was a career until I realized I can’t do anything else — there was always this goal of, ‘Oh cool, this is going to lead to another thing, and this would be another thing, and maybe this is going to be finding this thing,’ and then I realized, ‘Holy shit, the level I’m at, and what I’m doing, is good enough, and it’s probably all there is.’”

LIES are all about embracing the moment because, if the last few years have taught us all anything, no matter where you are on the ladder you find yourself climbing, things can change. And it’s this sentiment Mike gleefully holds close. “That influenced if we’re gonna get a little silly on this record, and try some new things like, ‘Well, who cares?’” he smiles. “That’s where I’m at now, where maybe I wasn’t there 10 or 20 years ago.”