“If you’ll make music, then there’s no level in shying away out of your identification or being embarrassed by who you’re,” Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos advised NME final 12 months when information of the Scottish guitar icons’ sixth album ‘The Human Concern’ broke. Buckle up, indie heads. Franz are again, feeling “at their very best, their most extraordinarily ‘them’”.
Their “most extraordinarily ‘them’” is a spirit, if not a sound. After they emerged with their dancefloor-dominating, globe-conquering, Mercury-winning self-titled debut in 2004 – all sharp fringes and even sharper riffs – the ‘Take Me Out’ stars’ mission to make you shake your tush with an arch and arty aesthetic set them other than the pool of watery Carling that surrounded them. It was a show of bravado with out overbearing machismo.
It’s been seven lengthy years since predecessor ‘All the time Ascending’, a highly-underrated document produced by the late, nice Cassius mastermind Philippe Zdar to show up the neon on the album’s chrome-plated dance-punk strut. Now with a 3rd iteration of the line-up and solely two founding members remaining, ‘The Human Concern’ blasts away any doubt of the chops of Franz 3.0 with the opening ‘Audacious’, dancing between the strands of the band’s DNA of scratchy storage rock within the verse and the glam-pomp of the refrain with echoes of ‘All The Younger Dudes’. Kick up the hearth and let free – “there’s nobody to save lots of us, so simply keep on”.
‘Everydaydreamer’ skulks with that silky noir really feel of 2008’s ‘Tonight’, with the frontman whimsily pondering drifting away into infinity. No time for that, thoughts, as ‘The Physician’ bristles with urgency because it performs out the story of a affected person who has “grow to be accustomed to this stage of affection” in hospital and is now weary of leaving – all set to a synth-pop romp indebted to previous collaborators Sparks. Carrying the theme, the menacing squelch of album spotlight ‘Hooked’ greatest captures the document: operating with “the human worry” and “sliding into midnight” as we cave into our obsessions.
There are traces of the previous with ‘Construct It Up’ persevering with the waltz of ‘40’’ and ‘Cats’ strutting with that quickdraw really feel of ‘The Fallen’ and ‘L. Wells’. Nonetheless, the album isn’t a slave to the previous: take ‘Inform Me I Ought to Keep’ (a runaway concept between intimate ballad, ska and musical theatre) and ‘Black Eyelashes’ (with sounds and pictures drawing on Kapranos’ Greek lineage for the primary time).
In unsure and scary instances, the place do you discover confidence? On the spiked post-punk nearer ‘The Birds’, Kapranos asks: “Is that what we wish? To be with others who know, who perceive who we’re and what we’ve executed?” This album is the reply to that query. On the vivacious ‘Night time Or Day’, he declares: “I’ll by no means get tired of you, or the factor you do”. It’s a love letter to the thought of this band. Nonetheless shamelessly livin’ it up, with an eyebrow cocked and excessive kicks galore, ‘The Human Concern’ is – as promised – Franz-y as fuck. You do you, hun; you do it so effectively.
Particulars
- Launch date: January 10, 2025
- File label: Domino Data