Franz Ferdinand on their bold sixth album 'The Human Fear' • Interview • DIY Magazine

Ahead of Franz Ferdinand’s 2018 fifth album ‘Always Ascending’, a group of superfans concocted a game. 14 years on from the self-titled debut that had delivered an art-rock-shaped shock to the indie system back in the distant early days of the millennium, such was the instantly-recognisable niche that Franz had created, they could now merit their own bingo card. “[The categories were] whether certain themes in songs would appear on the record or not,” says frontman Alex Kapranos. “Searching for some unreachable religious faith? Bingo. A sense of isolation? Bingo. So I thought, ‘Wow, I guess there are themes running through it all…’”

To those more existential lyrical throughlines, we’d add some overtly, unmistakably Franz-ian sonic ones to the card: the rare ability, from the sing-along guitar stabs of era-defining second single ‘Take Me Out’ onwards, to tick both critical and mainstream commercial boxes. A knack for marrying massive hooks with idiosyncratic ideas that always kept them elevated far above the so-called ‘indie landfill’. A melodic directness that made their subsequent 2022 greatest hits (so far) collection, ‘Hits To The Head’, make perfect sense as a title.

You can spot a Franz Ferdinand song from a mile off because, says Kapranos, they’ve never tried to be anything but themselves. “It’s about not wanting to follow the paths of everybody else and that’s always the secret to doing something fresh – being aware of what’s going on around you and then trying to do the opposite; to do what excites you,” he suggests. “And that sounds like a really stupidly obvious thing to say, but I always find it shocking how many bands you see trying to chase contemporary trends and, as a result, making themselves instantly unfashionable.”

Now aged 52, and calling in from the French house he shares with his wife and young son, Kapranos’ passion for music and art and the band that he’s stood at the front of for more than two decades still rings out of his every word. His more recent domestic duties mean that, in his personal life, he’s somewhat calmed down. “I definitely don’t drink as much as I did or go quite as wild as I did,” he nods. “But I’d like to think, in my creative life, I’m still just as reckless.” And it’s with this spirit that the singer, joined by original bassist and co-conspirator Bob Hardy and completed by more recent additions Julian Corrie (keyboard, guitar), guitarist Dino Bardot and drummer Audrey Tait, approached new album ‘The Human Fear’.

“I find it shocking how many bands you see trying to chase contemporary trends and making themselves instantly unfashionable.” — Alex Kapranos

There are not many bands of Franz Ferdinand’s lengthy tenure that would open a record with a track called ‘Audacious’ and then come good on the premise. Where the traditional path is to mellow over time (“Hey, I’m a mellow guy!” the frontman interjects), the Glaswegians seem to have no such inclination. That track kicks off Franz’s sixth with a knowing throwaway – “Alright, here we go with riff one…” – before jangling into play and subsequently exploding with a massive, arms-around-your mates terrace chorus. It’s unashamedly big and melodic: a tendency that, Kapranos explains, was, from the beginning, one of the most audacious moves you could make as a bunch of guys from art school.

“When we formed our band, the music that our contemporaries in Glasgow were making was very much about making noise, and making something impenetrable that was difficult to listen to but easy to create. Whereas I wanted to make something that had a degree of complexity to it, but that was easy to comprehend,” he recalls. “That’s what I love in my favourite artists, and not just musicians. If you stand in front of Guernica, that’s one of the greatest pieces of art of the 20th Century but you understand immediately what it’s about; same with if you read someone like Raymond Carver or Oscar Wilde – there’s beautiful artistry in the writing, yet it’s a joy and a pleasure to read. That’s what I always want to do with music, not to prove to the audience that you’re having a difficult time understanding it so I,” he says, emphasising the directive with an eye-roll, “must be fucking intelligent. I must be more intelligent than you. I’m not interested in that.”

From the earliest days of the band’s press duties, Franz were famously quoted as saying they just wanted to write “music to make girls dance”. In 2024, after the greatest summer for buoyant, characterful female pop stars in recent memory and amid a generally genre-less modern playlisting culture, it’s a statement that might not seem all that exceptional. Back then, however, it immediately set the band apart from their peers with an “anti-macho” ethos that they still carry through today. “You had post-rock music for guys sitting cross-legged on the floor, hanging on to their beards and nodding on one side, and then you also had this post-Britpop, very blokey, FHM Magazine male swagger [on the other side], which we’ve never, never connected with at all,” he says. “And I suppose that glib statement summed it all up to a degree.”

The process of getting from there to here, then, has consistently been one not of reinvention but refinement; of finding “new things to do while being you”. “I’m not trying to search for a new identity,” Kapranos says. “I know what my identity is. But I’m still trying to find new things to say to the world and new ways of saying them. I think [the key] is being able to say: ‘This is who I am and I’m very glad about who I am and I’m comfortable’. And that’s not just about being in a band, that’s about being a successful human being in general.”

“I know what my identity is. But I’m still trying to find new things to say to the world and new ways of saying them.”

Successful human beings might have created Franz Ferdinand’s latest but even successful human beings are complex things and, running throughout the record, are ripples of paranoia, passion, longing and, of course, fear. Fear, in their world however, is not something to run from but to run into. “Putting yourself in the situation where you have that fear in your stomach, whether that’s getting on stage or going on a roller coaster, if you go through life not having those feelings then is that even living? You’re just plodding along,” says Hardy. “I like ‘The Human Fear’ as the idea of embracing being alive. And then afterwards, when you’ve completed the task that’s given you that feeling, then you feel amazing.”

On ‘Hooked’ – the sleazy synth number whose lyrics give the record its title – that fear comes in the form of diving headfirst into a new relationship; ‘Tell Me I Should Stay’ begins with gothic melodrama as it slinks into visions of a tryst that could become more. ‘The Doctor’, meanwhile, is a propulsive, self-contained vignette that’s classic Franz Ferdinand. Stemming back to the singer’s childhood hospital trips at the mercy of his chronic asthma, it narrates an entire trepidation-to-institutionalisation story arc in 140 seconds. “I’d often spend extended periods of time in the hospital and, when you first arrived, you’d be panicking. But as the days go by, you’d find yourself getting comfortable and being looked after and cared for,” he recalls. “So when it was time to be discharged, I remember very distinctly thinking, ‘Maybe there’s still a bit of a wheeze and I need to stay a few more days!’ That’s what institutions do to you.”

Hardy explains that drilling down into these concepts was as integral to creating the record as figuring out the music within it. “I’ve got zero interest in jamming. I just don’t get the point. But I like to talk about music and I like the potential of what a band can do and can be,” he says as Kapranos picks up: “I think that’s probably the thing that sets us apart from other bands more than anything else. Most bands exist because there’s a bunch of musicians that want to play, so they sit down and go, ‘Let’s play some music’. Whereas with Bob it’s [always been] more about the big things: What does a band do? How do you reach the world? What are the things you’re trying to say with it, rather than the tedious minutiae of whether someone can play a blues scale or not. That’s boring; it’s the big ideas that are exciting.”

And Franz Ferdinand have still, undeniably, got big ideas. When we question if the seven year gap since their last indicated a wobble as to whether a sixth LP would in fact emerge, the frontman looks as confused, as if we’d suggested he might want to lop off a finger for a laugh. “The things that delayed us were Covid and doing the greatest hits record, but there was never any question that we wouldn’t go back in the studio,” he quickly clarifies. “I hope the next album doesn’t take seven years; I’d be really pissed off with both myself and the band if it took us that long and I don’t think it will.”

Describing the period of collating ‘Hits To The Head’ as “frustrating,” and the subsequent retrospective tour as one he “particularly didn’t enjoy”, Kapranos is firmly a forward-facing kind of guy. Where many of their early-‘00s peers, from Kaiser Chiefs to Bloc Party, are gearing up for a rose-tinted 2025 of anniversary tours, Franz are clearly happy to have hopped off that train and moved back into their own lane. If they were that way inclined, the band could probably dine out on the nostalgia circuit forever, but for the Glaswegian indie stalwarts, the only real satisfaction of assessing what had come before was to cement where they went next. “It showed me what the strengths of the band were and what I LIKED about the band. It clarified very distinctly what made Franz Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand,” the frontman says. “And there’s nothing more motivational than a sense of frustration to make you want to get things done.”

When it comes to truly defining Franz Ferdinand, then, maybe the game card needs a whole other section. A bloody-minded devotion to the creative cause? Bingo. A self-described “stubbornness and contrariness” in pursuit of the things that matter? Bingo. A commitment to keeping things smart and interesting that hasn’t wavered in two decades? B-I-N-G-O. “I’m not a particularly nostalgic person. I don’t have a romanticised idea of the past or think that the past is necessarily a better place to live; it’s just the place you were rather than the place you are at the moment,” says Kapranos. “And the place you are or the place you’re stepping into for me is way more exciting.”

Do You Want To? (No)

When it comes to modern listening habits, Alex Kapranos knows what he likes, and he knows what he doesn’t give a shit about.

“I have a funny relationship with most music around me at the moment or at any time. There’s always three or four things I find exciting, like right now I like English Teacher and Sprints and Chappell Roan. I love all of those things. And there’s occasionally the odd thing that I really don’t like which I tend not to talk about because what’s the point of bitching? The rest of it I tend to just not care about and not listen to it, and I feel like my attitude is the same as I have to people.

Think about walking around London and all the people you pass everyday in your life - most of them, you just ignore! They’re there but you’re not paying them any attention; you notice them, but it doesn’t move you in any way. But then you have your friends and the people you like and you’re really excited to see them - and maybe there’s a couple you don’t like who you want to avoid - but the majority, you just ignore them, and that’s how I feel about music as well. Most of it’s just there and who cares!”

‘The Human Fear’ is out 10th January via Domino.

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