On Their First Album in Six Years, Franz Ferdinand Find Renewal in Fear

It’s an overcast afternoon when Alex Kapranos joins our Zoom call from his hotel in Portland, Oregon, but he doesn’t seem to mind. If anything, it reminds him of Glasgow’s own trademark cloudy skies. In his 23 years at the helm of Franz Ferdinand, he’s always finding his way back to Scotland. “It feels like I’m home,” he laughs. Kapranos’s energy bounces through the laptop screen; he’s absolutely buzzing about the release of The Human Fear, Franz Ferdinand’s first studio album since they dropped Always Ascending in 2018. Kapranos is ready for the world to hear the LP, graduating from the swirls of fear that nudged the album into existence in the first place. “I didn’t set out to write an album to the concept,” he continues. “It was only after the last lyric was written on ‘Hooked,’ which starts off with ‘I’ve got the fear / I’ve got the human fear,’ that I realized. Underlining lots of these songs, there is a different fear in each of them.”

From their invigorating, eponymous debut 21 years ago, Franz Ferdinand have rode the ‘00s indie rock wave by remaining effortlessly mod in relaying their tales of debauchery. Their high-powered, twangy garage anthems have long balanced messy, smooth and sexy tones, but a question follows a band like Franz Ferdinand two decades later: Will their image age gracefully? The band has changed, with Kapranos and bassist Bob Hardy the only remaining original members. They’re now joined by guitarists Dino Bardot and Julian Corrie, along with a drummer by the name of Audrey Tait. On The Human Fear, Franz Ferdinand aren’t trying to restore their glory days or trying to make a life for themselves that’s no longer there. Instead, Kapranos is open to rebuilding the framework of his life while addressing the anxious dread that arises when the once-comforting structures of the past are no longer there. Whether it be relationships, the safety of an institution or simply getting older, he lays it all out in the music—all while preserving a fresh sound through cherishing the scenes of the band’s past.

“I do like the idea of fear, because all good things that you do in life require getting over it,” he admits. When he sat down to write the album’s first single, “Audacious,” it was him demonstrating that for himself, by creating something bold and vulnerable. “With that song,” he continues, “it was kind of an assessment of a situation, then a response to it. I was overwhelmed by some things that were happening in my life at that particular time. The chorus [‘We should just get on, get on with it’] was my response—I’m going to do something audacious and take ownership of the direction of my life. To me, that felt like a really positive attitude going into things, and making a record as well. I think once I got into that mindset, making the album was a total joy.”

The rest of The Human Fear operates on a similar structure of creative emotional release. The synthy second track, “Everydaydreamer,” finds Kapranos being honest about his desire to exist in fantasy. He “put[s] a good dream down” by facing reality. “I see no truth as mythical,” he declares later on “Build It Up,” a spirited track with scratchy breakdowns that sound similar to the grungy nightlife adventures of Franz’s third album Tonight: Franz Ferdinand. Underneath these outspoken commitments to self-betterment are less triumphant, assailable admissions to remaining stagnant in life—vignettes that stretch back decades, even lifetimes.

Kapranos wrote “The Doctor” about his childhood hospitalizations for chronic asthma. “You get into this situation where you feel safe and looked after within the context of the institution,” he says. “It’s the fear of leaving behind all the structure that’s kind of terrifying.” Closing song “The Birds” shifts the band’s focus away from the personal to the universal, writing about shedding anonymity and how rejection impedes growth, both artistically and elementally. Kapranos says that “these are the things that when you think about doing can paralyze you with fear.” “I still feel like that about going on stage sometimes,” he continues. “It can be terrifying if you actually think about what it is you’re about to do—standing completely vulnerable in front of all of thousands of people and opening yourself up. But it goes back to being audacious. You need a degree of audacity to get on that stage and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this thing which I’m going to do for you, which I think you’re going to like.’”

Some of the most iconic Franz Ferdinand songs are named after characters, both real and fictional, as Kapranos takes an imaginative approach on re-packaging his and his bandmates’ experiences. Take “Jacqueline,” the lead track from Franz Ferdinand, which was inspired by a friend of the band, Jaqueline Cameron, who is currently a politician in the Scottish National Party—drawing especially from her time as a young secretary. “That was a real story that she related to me, and it seemed really poignant in the way that she told it,” Kapranos recalls.

As Cameron’s career advanced, the meaning of the song evolved. “No longer working at a desk, but working for her constituents instead,” Kapranos tweeted in 2023 when his friend ran for a new position, referencing the track’s first line. But for The Human Fear, he wanted to switch things up by turning inward to inspiration for these real stories. He references the track “Bar Lonely” as one of these instances, which was born on a night out at a Tokyo pub in Shinjuku’s red-light district opened by a man whose lover passed away when he was very young. In an area where each bar usually has a distinct theme to it, Kapranos understood that that one’s was simply “to be alone”—but he and Hardy’s experience in the bar was quite the opposite. They spent the night making friends with the regulars, singing Beatles songs together and feeling warmly welcomed.

Inspired by his own experience, Kapranos played around with the events of that night—turning the song into a blurred line of fact and fiction. “We liked this idea, and maybe with a bit of poetic license, exaggerated it to some degree,” he laughs. “I had these two imaginary characters who were coming to an end of their relationship alone in this bar together, not talking to each other or anybody else. As is often the way, the fear of ending the relationship can be too heavy, because the emotional fallout that’s going to come, even if you know that it’s for the better. It’s a combination of real experience and letting your imagination run with the characters. An old Irish saying said it more poetically than I ever could: ‘The truth should never get in the way of a good story.’”

Working on The Human Fear was not just a matter of building the songs; revamping AYR Studios in Scotland, where the album was recorded, was Kapranos’s idea of a lockdown project when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit. With Corrie, who previously worked as an engineer at the BBC, they redid the upholstery and acoustics in the space, turning it into a place of comfort. “You know when you’re a kid and you want to build a den?” Kapranos asks. “That’s what it feels like.” The dynamics of The Human Fear set the record apart from previous Franz Ferdinand releases. They now have Tait, and AYR became a place of refuge. They filmed the deep-noir music for “Night or Day” there, too. “It’s not a conventional studio,” Kapranos continues. “If you look at the video, you can see that it used to be an artist studio in the 19th century. It’s not really the shape that a studio would normally be. Engineers hate it, but musicians love it.”

While promoting the release of the “Night Or Day” video, Kapranos in a statement claimed that “the dark heart of Scotland beats strong.” Ever since the band’s come up in the early 2000s, Franz Ferdinand have been synonymously inseparable from their home country—remaining large stakeholders in not just the music scenes of Glasgow but in the nearby areas that produced cross-generation acts like Belle and Sebastian, Primal Scream and the Jesus and Mary Chain. “All of these bands come out of that city with the same formative experiences, but they all make a very different sounding form of music,” Kapranos affirms. “I always found that fascinating, how you can see the flavor of a place, but the bands don’t necessarily sound like each other. It’s an artistic reaction—if you take a bunch of musicians, they’re going to respond to the same stimulus in very different ways.” But, geographically, The Human Fear lingers beyond Scotland. “My father’s Greek,” Kapranos adds, “ so some of that comes into this record as well. Bob is from Yorkshire. There were German influences before.”

For all of the noise thrown at Franz Ferdinand about their influence in rock ‘n’ roll this century, there’s no denying that they’ve mastered the formula for writing a great, hooky pop song. The band performed a zealous cover of Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” for the Sofa Session segment of DJ Jo Whiley’s BBC Radio 2 show in November, blending the budding pop idol’s retro, anthemic glaze with the very same pub sounds they were raised on (at the 1:19 mark, Kapranos serves up a guitar lick that demands a “so if you’re lonely, you know I’m here waiting for you” accompaniment). The niche, miraculously, soared colorfully. It wasn’t their first take on a pop classic on Whiley’s show, either; they’ve covered Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For” and Britney Spears’s “Womanizer,” too.

“It wasn’t an alien idea for us to cover a female lyricist or vocalist perspective,” says Kapranos. “With ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ in particular, there’s something about it which makes it stand proud from a lot of contemporary pop music. It feels like it’s coming from a real person with their unique emotional perspective on life. Like, bloody hell, I’m getting a really brutal and powerful insight into somebody’s emotional life here. I feel that while some people might define us as a rock band, or a dance music band or even an indie band, whatever that means. I think at the heart of it, I really love pop music, and most of the music that I love has an element of pop in it. And what defines pop for me is the immediacy and the comprehensibility of the melody—it hits me straight away.”

When it comes to being defined by often benign terms such as “indie sleaze,” Kapranos is quick to want to reject it—but he recognizes that it’s rare for any musician to revel in whatever titles they’re given, anyway. It can all be a bit cumbersome, he feels, but that awareness is part of what makes The Human Fear so real and brash. Kapranos and his bandmates perceive not just their own quirks, but how knee-jerk reactions to daunting stimuli can play into the contexts of their lives on all fronts, artistically, personally and in-between. Similar to the very last lyric he wrote on the album (“I’ve got the fear / I’ve got the human fear”), he’s aware of what unease continues to linger.

But, if there’s anything that Kapranos learned while making this record, it’s that fear has been there since the very beginning, since “Take Me Out” blew up and Franz Ferdinand became one of the most beloved rock outfits on planet Earth. And that it isn’t a negative. In fact, it’s a superpower. “I think anybody who indulges in some sort of creative output, you can’t avoid the context,” Kapranos concludes. “I think it’s great to embrace that identity and to not just accept it, but to celebrate it.”