College Street Music Hall Weekly Round-up: Two shows announced, including Snail Mail & Soccer Mommy

College Street Music Hall announced Snail Mail & Soccer Mommy and American Football this week. Tickets are on sale now at collegestreetmusichall.com.

Snail Mail & Soccer Mommy
College Street Music Hall – 238 College Street, New Haven, CT 06510
October 3, 2026
Click here to purchase tickets

Snail Mail

On Ricochet, her third album as Snail Mail, Lindsey Jordan returns to assert herself as a generational songwriter, clear-eyed and honest as ever. Time has passed, but she remains a sensitive soul, and here her incisive introspection is tethered to newly expansive and hypnotic melodies and ornate string arrangements. While writing Ricochet, Jordan found herself fixating on concerns she’d previously pushed out of her mind, namely death and what happens after. These 11 songs are colored by the anxiety of watching life slip through your fingers, as well as the vulnerability of loving deeply rather than frenetically. Ultimately, Ricochet is an album about realizing—and accepting—that the world still turns no matter what is going on in your tiny life.

Ricochet is the first Snail Mail album in five years, and a lot has happened in the interim. Before touring 2021’s Valentine around the world, Jordan had surgery for vocal polyps. She underwent intensive speech therapy and emerged as a more confident vocalist—on Ricochet, Jordan wields newfound control over her voice, ironically enough for an album about uncertainty. She made her acting debut in Jane Schoenbrun’s indie horror I Saw the TV Glow, playing a Buffy-esque heroine with psychic powers. She moved out of New York, floated around for a bit, and landed in the area around Greensboro, North Carolina. She’s 26 and has a fluffy white
puffball of a dog, whom she holds up to the night sky so she can see the stars.

All the while, Jordan was working on new music. She tried to write quickly— “which obviously didn’t work” —but with intention, aiming not to leave any material on the cutting room floor. “I’ve never done this before, but I wrote all of the instrumentals and vocal melodies on the piano or guitar, and then I filled in the lyrics all at once over a year,” Jordan says. “It takes me a lot more time and consideration to make great melodies than it does trying to connect things lyrically, so I gave myself more time to do the one.”

When it came time to record the songs bouncing around in her head, Jordan turned to a friend, Aron Kobayashi Ritch, the bassist and producer of the fuzzy indie rock band Momma. In winter 2025, they made Ricochet at North Carolina’s Fidelitorium Recordings, owned by R.E.M. producer Mitch Easter, and the Nightfly and Studio G in Brooklyn. Jordan describes the process as refreshing, trusting, and comfortable. “I felt like an equal voice,” she says. “He was as interested in my decisions as I was in his.”

Sonically, Ricochet sounds like the natural next step in Snail Mail’s small but mighty discography, building on the poised guitar parts of her 2018 Matador debut, Lush, andValentine’s raw rock passion. Ricochet channels the Smashing Pumpkins at their sunniest and Radiohead at their most Britpop, with notes of Catherine Wheel shoegaze, Ivy power pop, and Sunny Day Real Estate emo. These are welcoming and vibrant tones of the ambitious ’90s alt-rock variety, embellished with unusual chords and curious textures that tickle the ear. (The most immediate and obvious descriptor is, ahem, lush.)

Jordan’s early music largely dealt with matters of the heart, a territory that she tried to step beyond on Ricochet. “Misery feels safe to write about because I am good at it,” she says, “but I’m not bathing in my own agony anymore.” To feel the pain of everything and then nothing is a lonesome contradiction. Ricochet is a record about being caught in this whirlpool, but Jordan’smusic has never been so transcendent. The luminous opener, “Tractor Beam,” is driven by jangly guitars, but is ultimately about dissociation and “feeling othered while acknowledging that you’re spending a lot of your time and energy figuring out how to float away.”

While writing Ricochet, Jordan found herself drawn to art that explores the concept of life itself. The questions of artistic worth, ego, alienation, self-destruction, and failure posed by Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 film Synecdoche, New York cast a long-lasting existential shadow. “Nowhere” is informed by Laura Gilpin’s 1977 poem “The Two-Headed Calf,” about a young animal whose congenital condition allows it to see twice as many stars (the gentle stuff just kills her). On “My Maker,” she imagines flying a plane to heaven and overstaying her welcome at the airport bar. “Another year gone by,” she laments atop swirling guitars and spaced-out sprawl. “What if nothing matters?” “Oh, bouncer in the sky,” she wearily pleads on another song. “Let me in, I’m scared to die.”

Ricochet’s interiority reminds Jordan of Lush and other early music written in her Marylandchildhood bedroom.“I was writing those songs for so long, my whole life,” she says. “It was my diary.” On the grunge-gaze song “Dead End,” she mourns the simplicity of a suburban adolescence, of parking in a cul-de-sac and smoking with friends.

“I’ve aged out of thinking that you’ll have everybody forever. Many of these songs are about friendships, friends that I’m sad about,” Jordan says,“But I’m also talking to myself.” “Looks like you made it/Somebody would be so proud,” she sneers on “Hell.” “But you isolated/Alienate your friends/‘Cus they’re just a means to an end.”

“Sometimes it’s devastating to be close with people. You’re busy during a birthday party. Then it happens again,” Jordan says. “All of a sudden, you haven’t talked to somebody you care about in years. You wake up one day and realize you’ve put yourself in a snowglobe, and it’s cold and weird and plasticy.”

To this end, emotional detachment can be self-imposed and involuntary, a protective impulse and a clinical blunting. “Numb myself out/What else should we do?,” Jordan sings on “Nowhere.” “You covered me all in kisses/I said I couldn’t feel it, but I wanted to.” Slipping into the abyss can become a comforting guilty pleasure. “Fireworks going off from above/Lit up the sky like lightning bugs/Felt so alive then, I can’t explain,” she sings on “Cruise.” “Couldn’t wait to get home and hide my face/Couldn’t wait to get home and slip away.”

Ricochet’s cover is the first not to feature Jordan’s face. Instead, a distressed deep blue expanse is filled by a spiral shell. A spiral moves in dual, opposing directions. Inward winding suggests contraction to the point of disappearance, while outward motion implies the promise of infinity. Distance and time may lead us away from the epicenter, and growth may be uneven, in fits and starts, and maybe a few steps backwards. It’s easy to get tangled up in emotions along the way, but every rotation offers the chance for pattern recognition, for perspective, for the realization that you do it to yourself, that’s what really hurts.

Soccer Mommy

Sophie Allison has always written candidly about her life, making Soccer Mommy one of indie rock’s most interesting and beloved artists of the last decade. Allison has used Soccer Mommy’s songs as a vehicle to sort through the thoughts and encounters that inevitably come with the reality of growing up. After all, Soccer Mommy began as a bedroom-to-Bandcamp exercise with teenage Allison posting her plaintive songs as demos. Over the years, though, she has often enhanced that sound, using the endless production possibilities, newly at her fingertips, to outstrip singer-songwriter stereotypes. The records would start with songwriting’s kernels of truth, and she would then imagine all the unexpected shapes they could take. Every Soccer Mommy record has felt like a surprise.

On Soccer Mommy’s fourth album, the tender but resolute Evergreen, Allison is again writing about her life. But that life’s different these days: Since making her previous album, 2022’s Sometimes, Forever, Allison experienced a profound and also very personal loss. New songs emerged from that change, unflinching and sometimes even funny reflections on what she was feeling. (Speaking of funny, this is a Soccer Mommy album, so there’s an ode to Allison’s purple-haired wife in the game Stardew Valley, too.) These songs were, once again, Allison’s way to sort through life, to ground herself. She wanted them to sound that way, too, to feel as true to the demos—raw and relatable, unvarnished and honest—as possible. The songwriting would again lead where the production would follow. Nothing overindulgent, everything real.

American Football
College Street Music Hall – 238 College Street, New Haven, CT 06510
December 18 2026
Click here to purchase tickets

American Football

The quietest voices don’t just endure — sometimes they deepen.

For a band once defined by understatement, American Football has become something increasingly rare: one whose stature has grown less by nostalgia than through patience, self-interrogation and the long view. Since reuniting in 2014 after a decade-plus dormancy, American Football hasn’t simply returned to its past. It has moved forward in parallel with its audience, writing music that reflects the disorientation, compromise, grief and hard-won perspective of middle age.

Its fourth self-titled album (LP4) is the clearest and most satisfying expression of that evolution yet. It’s simultaneously the band’s darkest and most playful, its most complex and — paradoxically — its most generous. Throughout, LP4 stares matter-of-factly at despair while refusing the comforts of melodrama or easy resolution.

Indeed, on “Patron Saint of Pale,” frontman Mike Kinsella proposes playing Rock Paper Scissors with his soon-to-be ex-wife as a way to avoid signing their divorce papers. And on the gripping, eight-minute “Bad Moons,” he jokes about actually being two little kids disguised in a trench coat rather than a flesh-and-blood 40-something dad of two teens, before the reality of the situation can no longer be avoided: “I lost my mind in the dark / I told all my lies in the dark / I poured my drinks in the dark / I explored new kinks in the dark,” he sings, his voice seemingly cracking at times under the cold, hard truths.

“That’s the one where I was like, ‘Oh, fuck. My mom’s gonna listen to this.’ But I’m proud of it,” Kinsella says. “I think only a grown person would think those things or say those things, and I’m a grown man.” “Those are not funny lyrics,” drummer Steve Lamos adds, “but there’s a weird ‘fuck it’ to the whole thing that I love.”

That restless desire to grow and evolve has guided American Football since its return. The band’s 1999 self-titled debut became a touchstone almost accidentally — a record whose elliptical lyrics and interlocking guitar lines sneakily rewired Midwestern emo and post-rock alike. During the 2014 tour, the quartet was surprised to find itself playing larger rooms than it ever had the first time around. “It felt like stumbling into being a mid-level band without having earned it,” guitarist Steve Holmes says of those first shows back.

But over time, American Football leapfrogged existing as a mere reunion act and instead became a vibrant, ongoing concern. LP2 (2016) and LP3 (2019) documented that transition — the former cautious and connective, the latter expansive, exploratory and welcoming of new voices such as Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell. LP4 completes this arc with one astonishing song after another.

“The charm of the first record is that it could have only been made by kids,” Holmes says. “This record could only have been made by adults. There’s a swagger that comes with the confidence of having done this for a long time, and there’s gravitas to Mike’s lyrics. There’s still breakup and heartbreak in there, but it’s much more real.”

LP4 was initially born out of an interruption. After touring LP3 in 2019, the band planned a break. The pandemic stretched that pause into a three-year hiatus, during which Lamos, by day a college English professor in Colorado, stepped away for personal and professional reasons. Attempts to write remotely faltered. “It was not easy to do on Zoom,” Holmes admits. “And honestly, it wasn’t clicking.”

In the meantime, Kinsella and his cousin Nate channeled some of that material into an album for their synth-y side project, LIES, sharpening their shared language in the process and beginning the relationship with Sonny DiPerri, who they enlisted to mix. When Lamos returned and the band reconvened in earnest, something shifted. “It felt much more like a band again,” Lamos says. “There was a certain organic piece to this one that harkened back to what I associate with the first record.”

The Kinsellas then suggested recording LP4 in Stinson Beach, Ca., with DiPerri (My Bloody Valentine, Trent Reznor), whose presence proved crucial. “Sonny was a great, calming influence,” Holmes says. “Thanks to his energy and approach, it was easy for me to do what I felt like I needed to do,” Lamos explains. “For me personally as a player, this is maybe the best representation of what I would want to say on the drums.”

American Football also overhauled its process. Nate Kinsella devised an elaborate system of scratch tracks and modular demos, allowing ideas to evolve before the band ever entered the studio, while touring members Cory Bracken and Mike Garzon added the kinds of subtle touches that have made them indispensable onstage. “This record would not exist in the way it does without Nate masterminding a lot of the sonic details,” Holmes says. “He’s our Brian Eno or Jonny Greenwood.”

The result is American Football’s most sonically ambitious album: layered, dissonant, occasionally confrontational and always deeply felt. Piano, vibraphone, synths, trumpet and unexpected harmonic and tonal shifts disrupt the band’s famously smooth surfaces but invite new levels of depth and discovery. “The goal was to make the best record we could possibly make and not worry about how we’re going to recreate it live,” Holmes laughs. “That’s somebody else’s problem — which is currently our problem.”

That ambition is evident immediately. Expansive opener “Man Overboard” is built around a knotty, almost prog-like drum pattern that Lamos admits he had to later relearn. Lyrically, it sets the tone: resignation without self-pity, isolation rendered in stark maritime imagery. “I was born castaway / Lost at sea,” Kinsella sings, before the devastating refrain “Man overboard / It’s hopeless” previews what’s to come.

Across LP4, Kinsella’s narratives are unflinchingly heavy. Suicide, shame, divorce, addiction, self-loathing and rebirth all surface, often within the same song. “If you read the lyrics on the page, they can seem grim,” Holmes says. “But there’s hope in them.”

That tension is central to the album’s emotional arc. “It feels like stages of grief to me,” Lamos oﬀers. “Raging against how things work, and then increasing moments of acceptance as the record goes on.” Mike Kinsella doesn’t frame it so explicitly, but acknowledges the weight. “The goal has always been to say something giant and heavy in a very plain way,” he says. “On this record, I keep things a little more vague — and I think that makes it more honest.”

Songs like “No Feeling” and “No Soul To Save” flirt openly with annihilation, yet the music beneath them is lush, even inviting. “Bad Moons” stitches together two previously unrelated demos into a towering release Holmes describes as “maybe our most cathartic song ever,” while “Desdemona” threads phased, wordless vocals straight out of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians through the kinds of classic American Football guitar lines that still make people cry in bedrooms around the globe (“It’s incredible,” Mike Kinsella raves about the musical juxtaposition. “That might actually be my favorite part of the record”).

Guest vocalists further deepen the world of LP4. Longtime peer Caithlin De Marrais of Rainer Maria brings history and familiarity to “Blood on My Blood,” Wisp’s Natalie Lu provides the perfect ethereal contrast on the almost poppy “Wake Her Up” and Turnstile’s Brendan Yates contributes a key vocal harmony on “No Feeling” that was recorded the day after the band casually asked if he’d like to stop by DiPerri’s L.A. studio. Says Nate Kinsella, “There’s a shimmery, sort of silver quality to his voice when he sings high and nails those long pitches. It’s so beyond what I expected on that song.”

American Football now speaks with rare authority — not because Kinsella has raised his voice, but because he’s earned the weight behind it. LP4 stands as a document of endurance, friendship, creative trust and the strange grace of growing older without growing static.

“From the instrumentation to the arrangements to Nate running into a microphone and apologizing and us leaving it on the album, I’m really proud of the decisions we made,” Mike Kinsella says. “We’ve gotten nothing but better at writing songs. We worked together way better than we ever had before. This album is a leap of faith, musically, but I’m proud of us for being ambitious enough to try something diﬀerent.”

Don’t miss

• Mystic Seaport Museum to host annual WoodenBoat Show in June
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• Bryson Tiller to perform at the Meadows Music Theatre in September

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June events at Fairfield Theatre Company

6/5 – Jesus Christ Superstar
6/5 – Lez Zepplin: The Same Song Remains The Same
6/6 – Jesus Christ Superstar
6/6 – Joan Osborne SIngs the Songs of Bob Dylan
6/7 – Jesus Christ Superstar
6/9 – Melissa Ferrick
6/10 – Cheese Fries & Chili Dips
6/11 – Louden Swain
6/12 – Andy McKee
6/13 – Friends of the Brothers
6/13 – Rob Morton
6/14 – The Sadies
6/16 – Devon Allman’s Blue Summit
6/18 – Pizza, A Love Story
6/18 – Booker T. Jones
6/19 – Greg Hawkes with Eddie Japan
6/19 – FTC Summer Jam
6/20 – Black Uhuru
6/20 – Daniel Glass Trio
6/21 – Make Music Fairfield
6/23 – Caitlynne Curtis
6/25 – Livingston Taylor
6/26 – FTC’s 80’s Dance Party
6/27 – Albert Cummings
6/28 – Midnight North

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June events at Rentschler Field

6/22 – Post Malone, click here to purchase tickets

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College Street Music Hall Weekly Round-up: Two shows announced, including Snail Mail & Soccer Mommy