Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos believes pop music is getting “a bit stale”.
The ‘Take Me Out’ group have just announced their first studio album since 2018’s ‘Always Ascending’, ‘The Human Fear’, and shared the lead single ‘Audacious’, out now, and Alex says music fans have never been hungrier for “great live bands” like English Teacher, Fontaines D.C. and themselves.
Speaking to NME, Alex said of the current state of popular music: “Of course things go in and out of fashion, don’t they? At the moment there seems to be a hunger for good band that can play; that have a rawness and complexity to them. It’s the human energy that you only get from a set of people standing on stage and exchanging that between them.
“A very good example of that are English Teacher – who obviously just won the Mercury Prize. I saw them play a couple of months ago and I absolutely f****** loved them. Fontaines D.C. are another great band. Sprints had that when I saw them as well: they’re so much more than the sum of their parts. Something magical is happening when those people play together. No matter how sophisticated your pop production on Ableton is, you’re never going to quite capture that special thing that happens when people play together.
“A lot of great stuff has happened in pop over the last 10 or 15 years or so, but it’s getting a bit stale. People are feeling that. I feel there’s a genuine desire for the rawness and the depth you can only get from a band.”
As for what fans can expect from the LP, which is due out on January 10, they’ve experimented with some new sounds that are “quite extremely far” from ‘Audacious’.
Alex teased: “I’m not going to give away too much now because there’s still a bit of time before the album comes out, but I will say this is not the only sound that you’re going to get on the album – quite extremely far from it in some cases.
“I don’t think there’s a single song that you’ll hear on the album and won’t think, ‘Oh, is that Franz Ferdinand?’ At the same time, they will be thinking, ‘Oh, did they really do that?’ That’s not to say I start rapping or anything like that.”