“We all do things that we wish we hadn’t done,” Alex Kapranos purrs at the end of the new Franz Ferdinand album, but it sounds like his regrets are too few to mention. The Scottish mod rogues are back with their best album in 15 years, a resurgence for the craftiest, most clever U.K. guitar band of their era. The Human Fear is their fantastic tribute to misspent youth and an even more dissolute adulthood.
Franz Ferdinand conquered the world in the early 2000s with their gloriously frenetic art-punk dance-whore sound, scoring hits like “Do You Want To,” “Michael,” “Ulysses,” and the video game staple “Take Me Out.” The Glasgow boys had an avowed mission to play “music for girls to dance to,” which was a fairly arcane concept for bands in those days. But with tunes even tighter than their trousers, they exploded in the rock scene of the Meet Me in the Bathroom era, alongside NYC bands like the Strokes and Interpol.
This scene has retroactively gotten tagged as “indie sleaze,” which absolutely nobody said at the time, yet like “rockabilly,” “film noir,” or “Romantic poetry,” indie-sleaze is an after-the-fact name that sticks because it really does the genre justice. And if a drunk girl accidentally kicked a beer in your face while dancing on a table in the 2000s, she was probably singing “Take Me Out.”
The Franz lads set the bar high with their trilogy of Franz Ferdinand, You Could Have It So Much Better, and Tonight, impeccable stabs of post-punk guitar and synth-pop disco glitz. All three hold up smashingly, but especially that second album, with the high-energy art-glam rush of “Outsiders,” and “I’m Your Villain.” They crafted classicist pop tunes, brilliantly angled in the mode of the Kinks or Buzzcocks, without neglecting the clubland slut-drop imperative.
The Human Fear is a snazzier return than a fan would expect at this point. The band’s 2010s albums had their nice moments but no real sense of urgency. The real signs of life came from FFS, their quirky 2015 collabo with Sparks. But Franz switch it up here, with Alex Kapranos and Bob Hardy from the original quartet, expanded with keyboardist Julian Corrie, guitarist Dino Bardot, and drum whiz Audrey Tait. The line-up cleared their throats last year with a bang-up live BBC version of Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”
The Human Fear might sound underwhelming at first, but that’s just a pacing problem — it gets off to a sluggish start, with a couple of duds, “Audacious” and “Everydaydreamer.” Yet give it the “begin with Side Two” test, always useful for giving an album a second or third chance, and the songs just jump out at you. The off-kilter “Night or Day” veers from Aladdin Sane-style piano glam to full-blast rock strut, with a vow of romantic devotion. Kapranos salutes his Greek heritage in “Black Eyelashes,” a rembetiko-style folk stomp that builds into a zither-core tale of seduction, with a muse whose lashes flutter like a storm of bees.
The tunes go for three-minute punch, with occasional back-up vocals from Kapranos’ wife, French star Clara Luciani. “Cats” is an eerie ode to trying to tame your animal impulses, while the indie-sleaze synth friction of “Hooked” is enough to trigger vodka-breath flashbacks of sloppy strangers making out in the coat-check line. “Bar Lonely” is a Roxy-esque escape to a decadent cafe full of anonymous faces—“where no one knows your name/Where no one’s glad that you came.” Best of all, “The Birds” is a reprobate’s guitar march, with a “Take Me Out” groove and a Leonard Cohen-style soliloquy on a life of sin. Kapranos watches the big-city pigeons peck for crumbs and shrugs, “The birds don’t care what the birds have done.”
Franz Ferdinand came from a moment where bands didn’t worry about whether they had a second act in them; most were built to go out in a blaze of glory. They epitomized the indie-sleaze sublime if anyone did, from dive bars to the Grammys, where they played in a memorably surreal mash-up of Gwen Stefani, Black Eyed Peas, and Maroon 5. [ They did a trade-off with LCD Soundsystem where they covered each other’s songs — James Murphy and crew did “Live Alone,” Franz did “All My Friends.”
Yet Franz Ferdinand have stayed vital over the long haul — like their oddly linked NYC counterparts, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Both bands rose out of the same early-2o00s moment, yet neither got stuck there, giving themselves plenty of time to evolve between albums, as in the YYYs’ 2022 gem Cool It Down. With their 2022 compilation Hits to the Head, Franz Ferdinand proved themselves one of the only 21st century rock bands who could pull off a bona fide greatest-hits album without looking criminally delusional. But the delightful charm of The Human Fear is that this greatest-hits album now sounds incomplete.
