“If you are going to make music, then there’s no point in shying away from your identity or being embarrassed by who you are,” Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos told NME last year when news of the Scottish guitar icons’ sixth album ‘The Human Fear’ broke. Buckle up, indie heads. Franz are back, feeling “at their absolute best, their most extremely ‘them’”.
READ MORE: Franz Ferdinand tell us about new album ‘The Human Fear’ and pop growing “stale”
Their “most extremely ‘them’” is a spirit, if not a sound. When 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 apart from the pool of watery Carling that surrounded them. It was a display of bravado without overbearing machismo.
It’s been seven long years since predecessor ‘Always Ascending’, a highly-underrated record produced by the late, great Cassius mastermind Philippe Zdar to turn up the neon on the album’s chrome-plated dance-punk strut. Now with a third iteration of the line-up and only two founding members remaining, ‘The Human Fear’ 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 garage rock in the verse and the glam-pomp of the chorus with echoes of ‘All The Young Dudes’. Kick up the fire and let loose – “there’s no one to save us, so just carry on”.
‘Everydaydreamer’ skulks with that silky noir feel of 2008’s ‘Tonight’, with the frontman whimsily pondering drifting away into infinity. No time for that, mind, as ‘The Doctor’ bristles with urgency as it plays out the story of a patient who has “become accustomed to this level of affection” in hospital and is now weary of leaving – all set to a synth-pop romp indebted to past collaborators Sparks. Carrying the theme, the menacing squelch of album highlight ‘Hooked’ best captures the record: running with “the human fear” and “sliding into midnight” as we cave into our obsessions.
There are traces of the past with ‘Build It Up’ continuing the waltz of ‘40’’ and ‘Cats’ strutting with that quickdraw feel of ‘The Fallen’ and ‘L. Wells’. Still, the album isn’t a slave to the past: take ‘Tell Me I Should Stay’ (a runaway idea between intimate ballad, ska and musical theatre) and ‘Black Eyelashes’ (with sounds and images drawing on Kapranos’ Greek lineage for the first time).
In uncertain and scary times, where do you find confidence? On the spiked post-punk closer ‘The Birds’, Kapranos asks: “Is that what we want? To be with others who know, who understand who we are and what we’ve done?” This album is the answer to that question. On the vivacious ‘Night Or Day’, he declares: “I’ll never get bored of you, or the thing you do”. It’s a love letter to the idea of this band. Still shamelessly livin’ it up, with an eyebrow cocked and high kicks galore, ‘The Human Fear’ is – as promised – Franz-y as fuck. You do you, hun; you do it so well.
Details
Release date: January 10, 2025
Record label: Domino Records
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