Back in 2005, a then-quartet from Glasgow, Scotland, named Franz Ferdinand was opening for U2 on their Vertigo Tour, one of the highest-grossing tours of all time. They were told that under no circumstances should they use Bono's so-called “ego ramp”—a catwalk extending into the audience—during their own performance. Alex Kapranos, a most gentlemanly rebellious frontman, decided he’d waltz down it anyway. Regaling with this story on the set of their “Feel the Love Go” video shoot—the song’s inspired by bassist Bob Hardy's dabbles in Buddhism—the now 45-year-old marvels at that notion of inflated self.
In a church in Valencia, California, the corridors are filled with actors posing as members of a congregation. Kapranos is pacing the halls, gee-ing himself up for his big performance as a televangelist leader. Diane Martel, the video's director, is notorious for wanting musicians to truly dig into their roles. In turn, Kapranos has been studying his preaching. The power, the pomposity, the fun of commanding a room. He takes pleasure in his role as an extroverted leader, and today he's imposing himself on someone else's stage again, except this time it's a real deity’s stage, should you believe in such a thing.
“I've got an alternative career here,” he says with a smile, his hair a friskier blond than the mousy brown it used to be. Kapranos is not a believer, so his initial attempts to follow religious scripture fail. Instead, he addresses the room spouting his own thoughts on “the spirit of optimism.” He recognizes, of course, the parallels between getting this congregation animated versus driving a paying concert crowd wild through the power of jangly guitars and tongue-in-cheek lyrics. “When I was researching old footage, some of these guys genuinely believe they're doing something good. Others are total con men. But,” he pauses, “all of them are having a great time, and that's not too far removed from the world that we're in.”
Always Ascending—Franz's fifth album—plays out like proof that the band is also having a great time. It's up there with their best efforts, mirroring the dance-floor post-rock of their self-titled 2004 debut LP (you may know it from the breakout hit “Take Me Out,” a garage-rock stomp). This record’s a reflection in a disco ball, just...an upgraded, shinier disco ball. “Futuristic naturalistic” is the typically flamboyant term Kapranos has coined to describe it, such has always been his dismay for critics' own misguided obsession with trying to pigeonhole his band as “art punk” (“What the fuck? Because we all went to art school?”), indie (“HATE that”), or—heaven forbid—rock (“When you say rock, I just think: Aerosmith”).
A few days after the shoot, Kapranos is in an L.A. hotel taking a sip of Sauvignon Blanc, inhaling a plate of garlic shrimp. “My greatest regret—and there are not many—is not coming up with a genre which we occupy,” he says. “This time, we're trying to push ourselves into our imagined version of the future: Not in 2,000 years' time, this year's future.” The futurism is where they've “gone electric,” rewiring their brains and employing new techniques in the studio between London and Paris with the help of madcap and very French producer Philippe Zdar (one half of house duo Cassius). The naturalistic side pertains to Franz Ferdinand’s humanity. As of now, they’re yet to be replaced by a bunch of hypersmart, musically inclined automatons. In short: They’re still a live band.
“We were joking in interviews that the name of the new genre was 'natural futurism,' not 'future naturism,'” continues Kapranos, pleased with his own inventiveness. “The latter sounds like this horrible beach I stumbled across in Croatia by mistake one time. There were a lot of leathered Germans and gravity was winning.” He laughs into his wine glass, searching for an adjective for the sight. “Yeah…crispy.”
In the summer of 2016, things could very well not have been great for Franz Ferdinand. Things could have been over, finito, kaput. When Nick McCarthy, the original guitarist and keyboard player, decided to leave the fold and concentrate on family life, Kapranos, Hardy, and drummer Paul Thomson were faced with the question of replacement. But it turns out ending the band was only a momentary question. “Did we actually have that conversation?” Kapranos asks Thomson.
“Yeah, I think you flat out asked each of us, 'What do we do? Do we continue?' And Bob and I both said…” Thomson takes a dramatic pause. “Yes!”
Merely asking the question changed everything. “It's like getting a slap on the side of the head,” says Kapranos. “Your ears are ringing.” Julian Corrie, an Englishman who'd been living in Glasgow for years and came via the recommendation of Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite, was brought into the mix. Then, while recording the LP, Kapranos felt their new sonic ambitions would be most amply met live with the addition of another member. So four became five Franz Ferdinands, with Dino Bardot, a bassist in many previous Scottish outfits, including 1990s and V-Twin, completing the gang.
Franz Ferdinand always had more potential legs in them than their 2000s cohorts. They were happier than Bloc Party, smarter than Kaiser Chiefs, and contained none of the hunger for self-destruction that imbued the everyday existence of the Libertines. After "Take Me Out" exploded them across the Atlantic, they spent a decade carving out an equally rewarding back catalogue. You Could Have It So Much Better, their second album, led with the infectious singalong of "Do You Want To." Their third album contained "Ulysses," produced by Dan Carey (CSS, Hot Chip, La Roux), adding an LCD Soundsystem–ish dance-punk weapon to their arsenal. After releasing their fourth record in 2013, they undertook a surprising but no less welcome supergroup collaboration with ’70s L.A. glam rockers Sparks, called FFS, and toured together. That would become lead guitarist McCarthy’s swan song. After ten years on top, it was a pretty dream one at that.
His departure and the more electronic leanings of Always Ascending aren't coincidental. Signaling the end of a chapter, Kapranos was eager to begin a decade of band life anew. “We had to evolve,” he says, unlike some of their peers. “I don't like slagging off other bands, but there are ones who still live in the decade where they had most success.” Franz Ferdinand never played ball with the emerging British indie scene—NME's so-called "new rock revolution" featuring those bands mentioned above. You know the type. So why change now? “It's a nice life, but I don't feel like spending the rest of mine in suspended animation.”
With fresh blood in the mix, it was time for some reinvigorated experimenting. This go-around, Franz Ferdinand’s songwriting method was at odds with anything they'd tried before. For a track called “The Academy Award,” for instance, they programmed the bass line digitally, like you would a cracking techno number, then learned to play it live. “I wrote on piano,” says Kapranos, surprised. “My hands stopped falling into the same shapes they'd been falling into for the last 14 years. It's like finding yourself in a different city, trying to navigate to a supermarket.”
This approach of re-producing electronic music with live instrumentation sounds like a similarly ostentatious process to Daft Punk's last album, Random Access Memories, though, hopefully, less expensive? Kapranos laughs. “That's Philippe's mentality,” he says, referencing Zdar's approach. “It's a French thing. You should see what he's like with his strawberry tarts…” Zdar has to have the best of everything, so when the band arrived at his studio in Paris, he insisted that they eat strawberry tarts. “But you can only have strawberry tarts from this one pâtisserie round the corner from his house,” explains Kapranos, adopting a French accent. “Zey're twice ze price of any other tart in Par-ees, but we only eat zose tarts.”
At first listen, Always Ascending sounds like early Franz Ferdinand, but closer inspection reveals Easter eggs: a lilting piano melody, a souped-up bassline, a syncopated disco throb. “He's ruthless. It's the antithesis of multi-layered contemporary production, which is nonsense.” It's true, then, that when making an album you only really need pastry and strawberries. “Exactly,” Kapranos agrees. “It just has to be the best pastry.”
Let’s be clear here: Always Ascending is not a concept album. Kapranos doesn't like those. “Frankly, I don't believe artists who say their albums are about one thing.” Hardy butts in. “Ours is about Brexit, though. Wait, no. Don't print that!” Kapranos howls. “Oh my God, could you imagine that concept album?” The title track is inspired by news footage of the Akron airship in 1933, which was blown into the air with hundreds of soldiers dangling from it, then plummeted to Earth. It explores the conflict of relief and terror. “You know when you're in an accident and you're about to die, everything's slowing down and it's like, Fuck?” offers Corrie.
Thomson asks if anyone has been in a car crash before. They all have.
Thomson: “I was in a car crash, and I broke my thumb. I was in a band called The Lapse, and we were going down to play Reading Festival, I was quite excited. We were driving down, and it was the first time I was ever playing a music festival. The van crashed. I remember everything slowed down.”
Corrie: “You become hyperaware of everything, that flood of adrenaline.”
Kapranos: “There's also an acceptance. I've crashed a car before as well, and I know what it's like just at that point where you know you're gonna crash and you just go, It's happening. There's nothing I can do about it. I'm just accepting it now. And I wonder if that's what goes through my mind, imagining that literally as you let go, you're accepting, you're accepting your situation no matter how horrifying it actually is.”
It's a pretty Zen approach to mortality, which makes sense for a band that was asking themselves if they should even exist anymore. But now their camaraderie seems stronger than ever. “I like hanging out with those guys. I really do,” Kapranos says.
When reminded that they once said the ultimate goal was to become more famous than the original Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Hardy gets excited. “Two thousand fourteen was a low point for us in terms of Google hits, because it was the centenary [of his assassination].” The band was even invited to play the centenary—in Sarajevo. They thought it was a stupid, sick idea. “Also it was tempting fate a little,” Kapranos says.
With Always Ascending, though, Franz Ferdinand is beginning a shiny new chapter in their own Google history.